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New outlook on skills development can solve CTO headaches and fast-track coding careers in 2023

23Feb

By Africa BusinessNo Comments

South Africa News, Tech

New outlook on skills development can solve CTO headaches and fast-track coding careers in 2023

By Jessica Hawkey, Managing Director at redAcademy As 2023 begins in full swing, we can all be forgiven for feeling as though we have been on a seemingly endless roller coaster during the past year. However, despite the surprises and shocks, one thing remained consistent throughout 2022 and is predicted to be one of the most pressing challenges in 2023, for C-suites trying to keep up with a rapidly digitizing world: there has been and will continue to be, a chronic IT skills shortage, especially a shortage of work-ready software developers. Of course, this is a tragedy because alongside the software skills shortage is a crippling unemployment rate, especially among young people, while from a business perspective, C-suites in general, and CTOs in particular, are being hamstrung in fulfil...

As SA’s ICT sector looks to globalise, employers and practitioners are in search of the right skills

The number of South African employers reporting they are recruiting ICT skills overseas has increased dramatically in the past year – up from 38% to over 50%. This is a key finding in the 2022 JCSE-IITPSA ICT Skills Survey – the 12th to carried out by Wits University’s Joburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE) in partnership with the Institute of Information Technology Professionals South Africa (IITPSA), with the support of the Information Technology Association (ITA). The study’s authors, Adrian Schofield, production consultant at the IITPSA, and Professor Barry Dwolatzky, Director of the JCSE, describe the growing trend to recruit foreign skills as “disturbing, given the continuing high levels of unemployment in South Africa”. With pressures on business margins making emplo...

Remote work a win for SA ICT professionals

The Covid-19 pandemic brought with it some unexpected benefits for the South African ICT sector, including increased productivity and the potential for employers to reduce their operating costs. This is one of the findings in the first South African ICT Skills Survey to be carried out since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic by Wits University’s Joburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE) in partnership with the Institute of Information Technology Professionals South Africa (IITPSA). The JCSE-IITPSA ICT Skills Survey assesses skills demand and supply from both a corporate and practitioner perspective, to identify the most pressing skills needs and current skills capacity. The 2021 edition of the survey also set out to assess the impact the pandemic has had on ICT skills in South Africa...