Page 14 - EngineerIT October 2021

ICT

SA ICT sector navigates pandemic

unscathed; skills gaps remain

outh African ICT employers and sets. Everything required for the “new normal” was already in place.”
practitioners appear to have Almost 60% of employer respondents felt that the pandemic had not affected skills
Sadapted well to the COVID-19 availability, and overall respondent sentiment about the impact of work from home
pandemic and associated lockdowns, arrangements was positive. Employees have adapted to working from home, and many
with little to no negative impacts on companies report an improvement in productivity, saying this model would likely remain in
working conditions or ICT skills demand place in the long term.
and supply. However, significant digital Professor Dwolatzky said: “If there’s any profession that should lend itself well to
skills gaps remain. making digital transformation of the workplace possible and dealing with it comfortably, it
This emerged in the 2021 ICT Skills is the ICT community. It is interesting to speculate that a ‘job’ has changed – where it was
Survey carried out by Wits University’s once attendance at a workplace for a number of hours a day, people working from home
Joburg Centre for Software Engineering now need to be managed in a very different way and jobs no longer mean attendance by
(JCSE) in partnership with the Institute numbers of hours a day, but rather completing a collection of tasks or ‘gigs’. This raises
of Information Technology Professionals the question of whether the ‘gig economy’ becomes possible. One of the things we probed
South Africa (IITPSA). The survey, the was whether we are beginning to see the emergence of a ‘gig economy’. The conclusion is
11th since 2008 and the first since the that this is not happening.”
start of the Covid-19 pandemic, assessed However, he noted: “It’s still early days in terms of the changes we’ve seen since 2019,
what impact the pandemic and lockdown and the next few years may see new trends emerging.”
have had on working conditions and skills
supply and demand in South Africa. Skills survey reveals most in-demand IT skills
Report co-authors Adrian Schofield, Reported in the latest MICT SETA sector skills plan, the top occupations with hard to fill
production consultant at the IITPSA, and vacancies in the MICT sector are software developers, computer network technicians,
Professor Barry Dwolatzky, director of developer programmers, ICT communications assistants, computer network and systems
the JCSE, said in releasing their findings: engineers, ICT security specialists, ICT systems analysts and web technicians.
“The surprising finding is that there are The same report indicated the programming languages most in demand were found
no surprising findings! The survey shows to be .NET, C#, C++, Java and VB, with a decline in demand for people to maintain
that the ICT industry has coped well in legacy systems, such as COBOL developers. The report noted that many companies
these disruptive times without needing were adopting the agile project management methodology, resulting in scrum masters
to change much or re-invent itself. ICT being in demand. However, there are very few people in the country that have certified
companies and ICT professionals have qualifications to work with the method. The survey report listed Java, Python, Javascript,
coped well with new working conditions. C# and PHP as the top five languages.
They have not needed to scurry around The report noted that while the MICT sector includes over 30 000 companies, more
hunting for new technologies and skills than half of ICT practitioners work in other non-MICT sectors.

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