By Rabelani Dagada
There are more than 500 000 qualified technical and managerial positions that are not filled and most private companies are struggling to find appropriately skilled engineers. The irony is that South Africa has around 600 000 unemployed graduates (across all the sectors). The problem should be attributed to the fact that Corporate South Africa (private companies) is not playing its role sufficiently in terms of skills development. Corporate South Africa has been arguing that universities are not producing graduates equipped with the necessary skills. I don’t fully agree and it emanates from a wrong set of expectations of universities. The role of a university Information Technology related department is to provide students with broad theoretical perspectives. It is not there to equip students with practical skills. It is wrong, for example, to expect an IT graduate to possess Oracle Primavera skills. The least a University would do is to equip their students with various programming languages. It’s the responsibility of the prospective employer to provide Oracle Primavera training to their relevant employees. There should be more workplace training offered by private companies. Unfortunately, instead of growing its own timber in terms of IT skills, private companies are cannibalising each other by poaching their scarce skilled labour. This has led to the artificial increment of salary packages, especially amongst the black professionals. The IITPSA and IITP Foundation are exploring ways of working with the industry to deal with the skills shortage and the absorption of unemployed graduates.
Dagada (PMIITPSA) is the President of IITPSA
