Africa’s Tech Skills Landscape
As an employer, you may know this already: digital skills, especially coding skills, are becoming more essential and increasingly difficult to find. We invite you to invest in your future skills talent pipeline, by supporting African youth through learning opportunities and tapping into our network to find your next employee.
Not convinced, read on. The ACN’s live research initiative documents the opportunities and challenges across the African tech skills landscape. This research blog features many references to the South African market. We are looking for research partners to help us extend the scope of our coverage to other African regions. Please get in touch if you’re interested in collaborating.
Acknowledgements
These posts collate the findings of several reports. In particular we acknowledge the work of Adrian Schofield and Barry Dwolatzky who, for the last ten years, have compiled the most comprehensive research on the South African tech skills landscape in the form of the JCSE-IITPSA ICT Skills Survey. The results we present are from the 2019 tenth edition.
We also leverage findings from other surveys including the Xpatweb critical skills report 2018, MyBroadband’s 2019 IT Salary Survey, and Offerzen’s 2019 State of South Africa’s Software Developer Nation.
If you have data or insights to add, please get in touch.
Africa’s tech skills cost advantage could be eroded by remote working unless more developers are trained at scale. This could come at a high cost for the local African tech ecosystem as lower Africa developer wages converge with global market averages. We believe supported, self-driven online learning can help address Africa’s tech skills deficit.