/ 11 July 2011

Averting an ICT Crisis 101

Governments around the world are addressing the problem, so why isn't South Africa?

Too few learners are considering career opportunities in information and communications technology (ICT). Yet South Africa desperately needs many more specialists in this field, which offers lucrative employment prospects.

There is a strong relationship between a country’s economic growth and the level of education, including ICT education. We need to ask how well our education system meets the needs of a competitive economy.

Research I recently conducted on the shortage of ICT graduates in South Africa suggests learners are rather choosing careers in medicine, arts and engineering, law, accounting and politics.

My study was based on responses from 1 536 learners at 12 schools — five advantaged and two previously disadvantaged schools in Port Elizabeth and five schools in the Transkei. The preferences the learners indicated included medicine (17%), arts and engineering (10% each) and law and accounting (8% each).

But it was clear that many learners were not realistic about how their current marks and their school subject choices related to university entrance requirements for the careers they indicated. This confirms the important role that parents, teachers and guidance counsellors must play in a learner’s career choices.

My study suggested that learners in advantaged schools generally have parents and teachers who attended tertiary education institutions and so can offer at least some solid advice about specific careers. But learners in disadvantaged schools often do not have parents who attended university or even access to adults who can advise reliably on professional or technologically oriented career opportunities.

South Africa could learn from the United States Congress, which in 2010 supported the national Computer Science Education Week (known as CSEdWeek) to raise awareness of computer science and information systems education and computing careers.

The week involved students, educators, parents and industry leaders in signing a pledge to participate in and support a national effort to promote ICT careers and promote the importance of computing education at school and tertiary level.

Our learners too need to be made aware of the many ICT career opportunities in computer science, information systems, information technology, software engineering and computer engineering.

There are now more than 290 career tracks and job descriptions in the ICT industry, paying entry salaries of R200 000 a year to ones exceeding R1-million for qualified professionals. South African ICT graduates are nationally and internationally well accepted and their multiskilled education, which includes study in subjects such as business management, accounting, statistics and mathematics, are respected and sought after.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report 2008-2009 indicated that ICT is “the catalyst for growth in the current global turmoil”. The ICT industry workforce in the US alone exceeds four million people and the unemployment rate in the ICT industry has averaged less than 2% in the past decade.

But there is an ICT skills shortage internationally and nationally that is of great concern to modern business and many governments are intervening to try to address this. My doctoral study at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University Business School addressed this problem.

In my thesis I covered all aspects of ICT skills development from school to tertiary graduate levels, indicating specific interventions to address the industry’s concerns about the ICT skills shortage. My research includes both an ICT graduate skills survey and an ICT graduate skills classification framework.

South Africa operates in a world economy, participating and competing with a global workforce. For businesses to be successful in a global economy, a skilled workforce that is literate and ICT literate is necessary.

I believe the worldwide ICT skills shortage can be addressed only by closer collaboration between educational institutions, government and industry. Businesses worldwide are still struggling to emerge from the current economic downturn and need to change strategies and incorporate new technologies to adapt to new competitive global forces.

Companies in Africa, China, India, the Middle East and Latin America are investing in new core ICT systems and applications to serve rapidly growing customer bases. In the coming years businesses will increasingly invest in converged mobile computing, context-aware computing, augmented reality, cloud computing, social networking, pervasive computing, open-source software and integrating the various technologies.

Nationally and internationally businesses are seeking more diverse ICT skills sets from new employees and graduates, and organisations are finding it difficult to find professionals with the required ICT skills sets. ICT graduates need more diverse ICT skills sets than ever before, including soft skills, business skills, technical skills and programming skills.

Tertiary institutions offering ICT degree programmes will need to consider such findings. And South African ICT graduate skills will be sustainable only if there are interventions at all junctures — starting at school — to address international ICT personnel requirements. I believe such interventions, as indicated in my research, are of utmost importance for the overall sustained competitiveness of business in South Africa for the support and growth of the ICT industry.

André Calitz is a professor in the department of computing sciences at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University