[coolplayer width=”420″ height=”360″ ] Developers, Developers, Developers[/coolplayer]Almost every major South African ITC news site over the last few months has reported on the fact that there is a serious shortage of suitably skilled graduates coming out of tertiary institutions in SA. Even more remarkable is the fact that South Africa is not alone in experiencing this shortage – reports from Australia and the UK provide similar reading. Why the sudden shortage in South Africa though? …although not exclusive, I would suggest that: in preparation for the 2010 Soccer World Cup we are experiencing accelerated levels of growth in our country’s infrastructure, economy and in turn consumer spending power (these all directly or indirectly require IT solutions/services/products), as well as SA slowly starting to be recognised by the West as a viable alternative outsourcing destination. In response there has been an increased number of IT start ups who naturally require developers, added to this is the intensified demand from already established mid sized IT companies and most importantly the large corporates who raid our universities on their annual draft of the top performing students.

In my experience in the recruitment of IT staff (I’m speaking primarily of developers now), there has been an influx into my inbox of CV’s (95% of which are from graduates). However, due to their current lack of skills, most appear to be unemployable, now we are quite prepared as a company to employ graduates as we believe we have an environment in which graduates can flourish, and have so already in the past. The problem is that most graduates have a really dismal level of coding practice. Our Technikons and Universities do not place enough of an emphasis on actual coding, they are so busy preparing students to think strategically and how to become instant Project Managers that graduates leave their studying with the unrealistic expectations that they will with in a few weeks be leading development teams. Now in no way am I knocking the Universities for teaching this, what I am doing is saying that it is quite difficult and takes longer to become an effective Project Manager if you can barely code (knowledge power is vitally important when leading very technically oriented teams), just as important is the actual coding languages being taught. Open source languages are progressively becoming the standard requirement and students are not being exposed to these soon enough.

The best developers I have noticed are ones that love coding, they code at work the whole day and then go home and sit on their pc and code ‘just for fun’, it is a way of life for them, their hobby is their job! Having a pc at home plays a big part in developing coding skills….. Those who aren’t fortunate enough to own their own pc’s at home with internet access are therefore not able to develop their skills as effectively which would increase their employability – we at White Wall Web are working on a few projects that aim to potentially make a dent in the skills shortage…watch this space!