South Africa’s unemployment crisis cannot be solved by skills development alone. As Jessica Hawkey of redAcademy explains, real impact requires creating sustainable, long-term jobs, aligning training with actual industry demand, and building pathways that lead young people into meaningful work—especially in the tech sector where theoretical training falls short. Only by linking skills, employment opportunities, and business value can South Africa drive lasting economic change.
Tag: redAcademy
Closing SA’s IT skills gap and reducing off-shore investment ‘requires a shift in thinking’
Honoured as Top Tech Innovator at the 2024 Wired4Women awards, redAcademy founder and MD Jessica Hawkey is driven by an unrelenting drive to work towards closing the skills gap in South Africa. In doing this, she hopes to play a part in shifting the scales in the highly imbalanced ecosystem of off-shoring work, essentially taking billions of rands out of the economy so desperately in need of growth impetus. Change requires a shift in thinking, but she says this shift is already occurring.