Like yourself I have also spent many years looking into skills availability in South Africa and my finding’s differ from many…Barry in terms of expertise to customer demands SA does not have a skills shortage, the dilemma lies in the fact that there are simply too many IT sector services providers all living off the same clients drawing from the same skills pool…The market is over traded.

10 years ago there were a couple of hundred IT firms in SA with smaller companies haviing a average of 50 staff each, today there our thousands of SME System Houses with skills pools of 10 or less with many simply body shopping to a single organisation based on a special relationship or offering highly niche skills.

My own records show that we have lost 18% of our veteran skills pool (7 years plus experience) to off shore retirement else starting families etc…But the number of new professionals more than offset these losses.

Our other issue is the IT Recruitment sector…The job of finding rare skills today requires investments in market research and supporting technology, going on to data mine multiple search engines and networking sites both on and offshore as the manner in which professionals search for oppertunities has changed.

Many IT firms do not need market reach as they live well farming clients whilst recruitment firms do not have to work too hard to make their numbers due to fee values…Hence do not need to make investments in their delivery capability…Creating a vacuum in the delivery chain.

UK European USA and Australian recruitment firms run very powerful delivery infrastructures…Hence in terms of skills retention locally SA is a sitting duck when these organisations muscle into our skills pools…Which will increase in late 2010 as their economies recover.

As a Systems Recruiter in SA for several years I seldom have a problem finding a skill set to a location to a industry to a cost but often fail to deliver when asked for a BEE catagory as a search factor, nobodies fault…it’s simply a mathematical fact.

There you go…my pennies worth of input.

Vaughan Storey

However in reality it’s exactly the other way round – here at university we struggle to find and to keep intelligent and helpful tutors and junior lecturers for our students, because the South African IT industry is sucking them into their business like a sponge absorbs a drop of water. The South African IT industry, in my opinion, are greedily eating the seed corns which were supposed to be planted into the soil for the next harvest of crop. But such is business; they think in terms of their quarterly shareholder reports – and that’s it.