ITWeb presents: Skills dearth - A self-inflicted wound

Grumbling about the skills shortage is getting a bit tired. The time is ripe to say a collective mea culpa, and do something about it.

Jené Palmer, CEO of Spescom Limited, summarises the problem: "We know about the migration of experienced, scarce skills to greener pastures; the ongoing poaching of skills; the shortfall in university graduates; the skills gap that fresh graduates must bridge; and the maths and science void at the very lowest levels of our education system."

Hamilton Ratshefola, MD of Cornastone Consulting, adds: "India and China have population figures of more than a billion people, and they're able to meet their own IT needs and export surplus skills. In South Africa we have 40 to 50 million people, and we cannot meet our own IT needs, let alone export surplus skills."

A NATION OF SELF-FLAGELLATORS

Who's to blame? In short, everyone involved in the skills game:

• A government that lacks the foresight to address the critical shortage effectively;
  
• A short-sighted industry that would rather poach and drive the cost of skills up than spend money on developing employees and add to the skills pool;
  
• A Sectoral Education and Training Authority (SETA) system with little record of success;
  
• Out-of-touch, financially inaccessible universities that don't produce workplace-ready qualifications; and
  
• An 'entitled' workforce insistent on enriching itself.
  

WORSE ON CLOSER EXAMINATION

Ziaan Hattingh, MD of IndigoCube, has strong words on the matter, accusing, firstly, the public schooling system of failing the country in general, but particularly the fields that require maths and science entrants. It is especially bad in rural and township areas. "If one uses current South African demographics, this means at least 80% of potential IT industry candidates are disqualified from entering it," he says. "If we can fix only 25% of the rural schools so they produce quality output, we will double our annual supply of suitable candidates for IT and other fields."

Hattingh is also perplexed by the failure of companies to develop the skills of people they've trained. "Companies spend large sums of money on training in an isolated attempt to develop skills. What they forget to do is ensure that the knowledge gained during training is properly converted into skills, through the repeated application of their acquired knowledge."

In this way, companies waste inordinate amounts of money on graduate development programmes that are little more than lengthy and over-elaborate induction programmes that do nothing to produce skilled and productive young people, he adds.

He also slates over-abundant use of contractors as opposed to permanent appointments. "This is often driven by a desire to keep the formal headcount low and manipulate employment equity statistics. Contractors are in fact costly and tend to move around a great deal."

RADICAL SOLUTIONS

As more and more voices are heard in dissent of the way the system is being administered, more radical solutions are being flighted too. The DA has called the SETAs "poorly performing, badly administered entities that have not done much to relieve the skills shortage, with few exceptions". Hattingh goes one better: "They add absolutely no value to education and skills development, waste taxpayers' money and should be abolished."

Nor does he think skills development levies have had the desired effect. "They encourage companies to train people. Who are you going to train when the education system is failing and people are leaving the country?" But the Labour Ministry has no such plans for a radical rewriting of the country's training and skills development, with Labour Minister Membathisi Mdladlana saying in 2007 he had no doubt that the SETAs would "march gallantly forward".

Greg Vercellotti, executive director of software development firm Dariel Solutions, divides the IT industry into two camps - companies that go looking for the right skills, and the ones that develop them. "Many companies poach skilled employees, but many others are actively involved in developing skilled workers through learnerships, mentorships and internal training and development facilities, especially at grass roots level," he says.

WHICH KIND ARE YOU?

But learnerships are wide open to criciticism. Fusion Outsourcing Services, a Cape-based contact centre for the UKbased Budget Insurance Group, has had to supplement contact centre and insurance product training in an extensive learnership programme - adding voice training, soft skills and cultural sensitivity training to the below-par learnership candidates it gets from the Services SETA.

Says Johann Kunz, MD: "The support that the business process outsourcing and offshoring (BPO&O) industry gets from the government, while laudable, needs a major rethink."

Kunz says the skills drama in the BPO&O sector can be addressed with greater success if government revisited its investment incentives, skills development, marketing, infrastructure and other support mechanisms:

• Programme focus - at a high level, government must have certainty about South Africa's niche value proposition in BPO&O. Once this is determined, the industry can be marketed in earnest and training instituted.
  
• Marketing the sector to prospective job market entrants and investors must be more intensive.
  
• The Services SETA will increase its success if its learnerships recognise prior learning and are aligned with commercial requirements, such as market regions (Europe and the UK).
  
• The ease of investing in the country leaves much to be desired. Shop window TORQUE IT, a 66% black-owned business, is one of Africa's leading ICT training and solutions companies. Its 3 divisions: Torque Technical Training, Torque Career Campus and Torque Education Resources, provide high-level technical and user training in 24 countries in Africa.
  

AVOID GOING GREY

Technical training doesn't just involve a classroom, a trainer and some courseware. It is a specialised intervention involving rigorous quality control and measurement, lab equipment running into the tens of millions of rands and other conditions that cannot be replicated in-house, says Carl Raath, Torque-IT technical director.

However, while technology training is best done by authorised outsourced providers, on-the-job skills development is best tackled in-house. Ziaan Hattingh, MD of IndigoCube, says where formal skills development know-how is materially lacking, it makes sense to employ an external provider that does.

Dr Ludi Beukman, HR development specialist as Softline VIP, says cultivating managers is most effectively and cost-effectively achieved through inhouse training. "But companies should strike the right balance between cost on the one hand, and capitalising on outside guidance on the other."

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