South Africa\u2019s specialised ICT skills gap persists, despite competitive salaries and efforts to build a skills pipeline, according to speakers at the Digital Skills Summit, co-hosted by the Institute of Information Technology Professionals South Africa (IITPSA) at Leaderex 2019 in Sandton.<\/p>\n
The institutes\u2019s Adrian Schofield, said that South Africa\u2019s education system and enterprise environment were simply not geared to deliver high end ICT skills in the numbers South Africa needs.<\/p>\n
\u201cOver 1.2 million young people go into the basic education system and if we\u2019re lucky, around a quarter of them finish matric. How can they get a good start in the digital world if they can\u2019t even get through basic education? There is not enough investment in basic education to create the pool of ICT skills South Africa needs,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He said while education investment was an important start, industry bodies, vendors and enterprises also had to invest in upskilling young professionals and giving them the experience they needed to enter the job market and progress into key roles.<\/p>\n
Schofield noted that South Africa was losing highly skilled ICT professionals and seeing an influx of foreign ICT skills at the same time, which confused the issue and made it difficult to determine how many skills the country actually had, and what the shortfall was.<\/p>\n