IT training
SA IS not alone in suffering from a severe shortage of skilled technicians since India’s world-famous IT industry will also run out of steam unless the country can double the number of IT graduates.
Ideally India needs at least 300000 new technicians a year. But its university training is so disconnected from requirements that 75% of graduates in all disciplines end up in jobs that bear no relationship to their studies, says Ganesh Natarajan, chairman of the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom).
Its IT industry employs 2 million people and is growing by 25% a year, yet only about 60000 technology graduates enter the workforce each year.
Natarajan was in SA this week to strengthen ties between the two countries and to encourage South African businesses to get more involved with schools and universities.
That is important not only for local companies, but also for the growing number of Indian companies being recruited to partner with South African businesses to fill the gaps.
Natarajan is CEO of Zensar Technologies, which has 380 engineers working on projects for local companies including Liberty and Discovery.
“We have first hand experience of the skills problem here,” he said during the Gartner technology conference in Cape Town last week.
Last year Zensar earned $12m in SA by helping financial services companies develop and support new software. Of its 380 people working on local projects, 220 are based in India and 160 in SA. Of those, about 80 are Indians and the other half were recruited locally.
Zensar is talking to skills development agencies to see how it can contribute to improving training resources in SA. “The biggest problem you have is that so many people who have left over the past 15 years don’t see a reason to come back. Unless you have globally competitive professionals working in SA you really can’t support the local development needs,” he says.
Gartner analysts describe the global skills crisis as probably the biggest challenge facing hi-tech players. The shortage is particularly acute in SA as the already small pool of technicians is constantly depleted by emigration as foreign companies offer better wages and safer living conditions, says Gartner Africa MD Rene Jacobs.
SA’s IT and telecoms industry had a daunting 37565 vacancies at the end of last year, according to the labour department’s National Scarce Skills report. Since the industry revolves around 250000 jobs, that is a 15% deficiency.
Companies worsen the problem by failing to train new recruits for fear that they will lose them later, says Adrian Schofield, manager of applied research at the Johannesburg Centre for Software Engineering. “They prefer to find people who have experience and pick them up at inflated salaries from elsewhere rather than invest in new people,” he says.
The average IT worker stays with a company for a mere one to five years because of that poaching mentality.
A perennial problem is that academic qualifications without practical application mean students are not work-ready when they graduate, Schofield says. One answer is to prioritise practical efforts such as learnerships and corporate coaching labs where students can gain hands on experience.
“That practical work experience enables them to perform immediately when they get into the work environment,” he says.
There should also be more emphasis on entrepreneurial training, so graduates can set up their own businesses.
Natarajan believes SA could learn from tactics being tested in India, where the IT industry gets deeply involved in education. One initiative is for Nasscom to work with nongovernmental agencies and internet cafes to offer affordable 100 hour training courses for people interested in IT.
Nasscom is also persuading universities to run vocational IT courses for students alongside other degrees. “Students typically work for three hours a day on some courses,” he says.
The IT Awareness Courses fill their spare time with training funded by the private sector, which includes internship periods during holidays.
Natarajan hopes that this will bring 300000 more technicians into the workplace each year, because once they have completed a degree and the specialisation course they “hit the ground running”.
“At the moment we can’t grow our businesses because we can’t get the right people and we are spending too much money retraining them,” he says.
SA could also emulate another Indian scheme that lures expat workers back home by creating “leadership cities” with a high standard of living. So far seven such cities have been created, and Cape Town and Sandton are the obvious candidates to become leadership cities in SA, Natarajan says.
The leadership cities have very little crime, largely because the cost of living is relatively high so there are few vagrants and few social problems as everyone is on a similar footing.
“They have a rubbish infrastructure like everywhere else in India, but people actually want to live there,” he says. “We find people great places to live and great schools for their children, and we are getting so many people coming back.”
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