Prenesh Padayachee, Internet Solutions

Local organisations report skills gaps across emerging technologies

IBM’S latest Tech Trends Report (2012) has shown on average about half of South African organisations report a moderate to major skills gap across the top four emerging technologies, namely: mobile (49%), cloud (50%), social business (49%) and business analytics (48%). The report also claims only one in 10 companies testify to having all the necessary skills across all four emerging technologies.

According to Willie Schoeman, managing executive of technology at Accenture SA: “Even in a market that is off the peaks that it was experiencing a few years ago, demand for specific skills is as high as ever, and the emergence of new technologies increases pressure on certain skill domains.” He says the current challenge is the re-skilling from old technologies to current ones.

Says Patrick Evans, MD of Advanced Cloud Technologies: “While catchphrases such as cloud, mobility and big data are commonplace, and rapidly emerging as key trends within the consumer sector, not all enterprises are aware of what it takes to truly capitalise on these disruptive technologies, and the skills involved in implementing them.

“The lack of big picture thinking skills is already apparent locally and will have a negative impact on the adoption of these technologies within the enterprise,” he explains.

“Specific skills such as coding are in high demand, and the outlook from an IT perspective does not seem bleak; the opposite is true for the burgeoning cloud, mobile and big data sector, especially when you view it holistically,” says Evans.

Another issue, according to Grant Lloyd, CTO of Sage South Africa, concerns skill-sets around legacy and/or less popular products such as COBOL, VB6 and possibly even Delphi. “These types of skills have definitely become more scarce as the new generation is schooled on Java, PHP, .net, HTML5, JavaScript and even native mobile OSs such as iOS and RIM.”

He says resources in the newer, more popular environments and languages are conversely more available as these new paradigms become mainstream, and as the educational institutions produce more qualified individuals for the market. “However,” he continues, “while resources can be identified in these technological areas and skill-sets, capabilities and standards vary widely.”

Prenesh Padayachee, CTO at Internet Solutions, expects the widening skills gap trend to continue for the foreseeable future. “School students are not being given career guidance related to IT that goes beyond software development, probably because IT tends to be handled by teachers whose primary training is in another subject. Also, very few schools have adequate bandwidth, and therefore, feature-rich Internet access,” he says.

WANTING TO GROW

According to Wesley Lynch, CEO of Realmdigital, businesses want to grow, and SA and the rest of the continent want growth, so there shouldn’t be a skills shortage. “However, this remains a big problem, particularly with our shortage in mobile skills. While we might be better off than some countries when it comes to mobile because of the amount of exposure we have had to mobile as an emerging market, a lot of our resources are working with overseas companies and ventures, making it very difficult to compete globally,” he explains.

Grant Lloyd, Sage South Africa

In the short term, says Schoeman, offshoring work that requires scarce skills may alleviate the skills gap, but this option will become less attractive as offshore labour costs rise, particularly in a situation of a weakening rand and higher inflation situations of some off-shore locations. “The most effective thing that local companies can do to lessen the skills gap is to invest in developing skills in-house and ahead of the demand curve,” he says.

According to Padayachee, in order to ensure a steady flow of the appropriate skills into a business – and the industry as a whole – companies need to run their own accelerated graduate programmes. “They should increase their options further by breaking down the white male domination of the industry that still exists, and proactively encouraging more women and people of different cultures to enter the sector.”

Desmond Sanders, professional services and sales engineer at Kaseya, believes companies can turn to technology to fill the skills gap in many instances. “The automation of systems management, for instance, is filling a number of gaps in the IT job market and allowing fewer skilled staff to do more.”

He states companies should also continue to invest in their staff in terms of up-skilling and improving competencies in all the new forms of technology entering the corporate IT environment. “This is a major area of concern, as companies sometimes invest in new technology, but don’t invest the commensurate amount of money in the necessary training and skills development required to derive the full value of the solution.”

According to Lloyd, as the world becomes increasingly technologically driven, demand on project delivery in the sector has grown exponentially. “Furthermore, the rapid redundancy of designs and specifications in response to swiftly evolving market demands and requirements further underpins the need for innovative, agile and responsive software development approaches.” This infers a higher level of domain expertise by architects, engineers and programmers, he notes.

“In order to respond as rapidly as required by commercial sponsors, programmers must now understand the marketable requirements, customers, target market and distinctive characteristics of the application they are responsible for engineering. This further exacerbates the demand for more experienced and domain-oriented technologists, who are not only technical by trade, but who also understand business, commercial domain requirements and consumers specifically,” he states.

According to Evans, the issue which many are not necessarily aware of is that mobility, as a disruptive technology, is not an IT issue. He says most enterprises see mobility as a BYOD issue within an IT department, when in fact it is a business challenge and a tool that can enhance customer experience.

“The reality is that your customer has been undergoing a personal digital revolution for the past 10 years and he might very well find how you do business utterly boring and ineffective,” says Evans. “Take an average marketing manager. He may know how to use his mobile phone and possibly has a few applications downloaded, but that is where it ends. Mobility is seen as a fourth screen of advertising, which means he is completely missing the point of disruptive technologies and their collective role as a tool to improve communication and service to customers.”

Evans says this kind of skill does not exist in SA. “All enterprise businesses should have a comprehensive mobile strategy and the necessary skill-set to implement it. It is a game-changer, enables business transformation and is potentially the most influential customer experience enhancement tool to emerge this decade.

“Simplistically,” he continues, “it is ‘B2B2C’, but to do this effectively requires skills in mobility, social media and big data, with one person leading the mobile strategy and specialists within each of the respective fields. “You need ‘big picture’ thinkers who know how to leverage these mega-trends and can change the balance of power in business. We need to start developing the skill-sets required now, before it is too late and our evolution as an emerging market is hampered by a severe shortage at a critical juncture in enterprise business development.”

GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

Globally, the skills shortage is possibly less acute than in SA, according to Schoeman. “We have recently seen a significant number of expats returning to SA because the demand for skills is greater here than in some of the economically depressed countries in Europe. However, in the emerging technology fields, the global skills shortage is very real. As companies struggle to adapt to new opportunities presented by mobile technologies, the demand for skills in this area has far outstripped supply,” he explains.

According to Lloyd, it may be a cliché, but technology has become hugely pervasive in every aspect of society.

“Put simply, Educational institutions have not even remotely been able to service the huge demand for skill-sets in the modern world. This problem will, over time, be exacerbated as the arms race of the mid-20th century is replaced by the technological brains race of the 21st century,” Lloyd concludes.