{"id":367862,"date":"2020-01-23T09:03:19","date_gmt":"2020-01-23T07:03:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=367862"},"modified":"2020-01-23T09:05:17","modified_gmt":"2020-01-23T07:05:17","slug":"south-africa-has-a-huge-problem-retaining-skilled-and-talented-workers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/business\/367862\/south-africa-has-a-huge-problem-retaining-skilled-and-talented-workers\/","title":{"rendered":"South Africa has a huge problem retaining skilled and talented workers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Insead Business School has published its 2020 Global Talent Competitiveness Index (GTCI)<\/a><\/strong>, a comprehensive annual report measuring how countries grow, attract and retain talent.<\/p>\n

South Africa has continued to slide down the overall rankings, with the GTCI highlighting the country’s struggle to retain talent to help boost the economy.<\/p>\n

On the overall ranking, South Africa falls near the middle, in the lower half, placing 70th out of 132 countries measured in the report.<\/p>\n

“South Africa is a consistent performer with positions in the lower part of the third quartile in five of the six pillars…but faces a significant challenge in strengthening its ability to retain talent,” Insead said.<\/p>\n

Of particular note are South Africa\u2019s performances in Access to Growth Opportunities (35th) and Talent Impact (47th), which boost the pillars Grow (54th) and Global Knowledge Skills (60th), respectively. However, its highest-ranked pillar is Attract (52nd) due to relatively high levels of External Openness (53rd) and Internal Openness (57th).<\/p>\n

The one dimension that drags down South Africa\u2019s overall ranking in the GTCI 2020 is its weak ability to retain (106th) talent, which stems from poor Sustainability (108th) and Lifestyle (102nd).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Across the six main pillars, South Africa ranks lowest in Retain – measuring how a country is able to retain the necessary talent to be globally competitive.<\/p>\n

The more talented the person, the wider the global opportunities he or she can find elsewhere, the group said. Retaining talent is thus necessary to ensure sustainability, and one of the main components of retention is quality of life.<\/p>\n

It’s within this pillar that South Africa has the most problems, placing outside of the top 100 in things like sustainability, the pension system, environmental performance, lifestyle – and worst of all, personal safety.<\/p>\n

However, problems crop up in other pillars too.<\/p>\n

Within the factors measuring an enabling environment, South Africa performs weakly in providing employment to tertiary educated people. Worryingly, the country’s labour-employer cooperation is ranked as the fifth worst in the world (ranking 128th overall).<\/p>\n

Inequality is also a major factor affecting the country’s attractiveness rating, with social mobility (the ability to improve one’s lifestyle upwards) ranking outside the top 100 as well.<\/p>\n

When looking at global knowledge, South Africa has a relatively low number of professionals – and the GTCI found that many of the skills developed by the country’s education system end up being irrelevant to building a competitive economy.<\/p>\n

One such skill the report looked at in more detail is AI, where South Africa is trailing behind, despite the looming ‘AI revolution’ which is expected to dominate the skills landscape.<\/p>\n

“Talent competition, and labour markets in general, have started to be impacted by the rise of AI; this trend will not diminish in the foreseeable future,” Insead said.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

South African cities<\/strong><\/p>\n

Looking at the most competitive cities, Cape Town and Joburg are the only two cities represented in South Africa, placing low on the list, but close to each other.<\/p>\n

Cape Town is slightly more competitive than Joburg, ranking 134th, two places above the latter’s 136th. 155 cities were ranked.<\/p>\n

\n

Read: <\/strong>Is this a blueprint for mass job creation in South Africa?<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Insead Business School has published its 2020 Global Talent Competitiveness Index (GTCI), a comprehensive annual report measuring how countries grow, attract and retain talent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":310426,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9872],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-367862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-headline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367862"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":367870,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367862\/revisions\/367870"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/310426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}