redAcademy’s experiential learning hub has found innovative ways to close the technology skills gap with a business-education model that not only fast tracks the careers of young South Africans but responds rapidly to what companies need from IT professionals now – evidenced in their high rate of successful placements in relevant positions within the tech industry.
Two recent statistics bump painfully against each other. Sixty-five percent of South African employers polled in the 2024 Institute of Information Technology Professionals South Africa (IITPSA) ICT Skills Survey, said skills gaps were having a moderate or high impact on their businesses.
Yet, despite the demand for IT professionals in the recruitment market, hiring activity declined by 5% in the fourth quarter of 2024, bringing the year-on-year decline to -19%.
It’s time to radically overhaul the talent pipeline that supplies South Africa and the continent with critical technology skills.
Prioritising skills and organisational fit over degrees
The World Economic Forum has stated that skills, not degrees, will shape the future of work but that the success of this approach will depend on how well companies are able to change their mindset.
A move from credentials only, to an “always-on, skills-based education and employment infrastructure with fitness-for-job and employment outcomes”.
Matching both hard and soft skills to the rapidly changing technology landscape is increasingly important. So important that a third of local businesses planning to expand their talent pool will remove degree requirements for roles within their companies.
Jessica Hawkey is the managing director of redAcademy that partners with corporates to fast-track carefully chosen South Africans into IT careers through a one-year, QCTO and MICT SETA-accredited programme.
The programme provides candidates with workplace experience and customised skills sets, ensuring they’re ready to contribute to future employers from day one.
The first six months are weighted toward theory and the next six give candidates real-world opportunities to engage with live development and deliver leading enterprise technology solutions for major clients. redAcademy remains the single point of management and accountability throughout the year’s full lifecycle.
She says,
“Our fully customised programme, based on ensuring candidates get real work experience, not only QCTO accredited training, is something a lot of stakeholders do not have in the market. We are seeing, in the long term, that developers without degrees are earning just as much as those with degrees.
“Companies are more inclined to pay only for the value an individual delivers. If people without degrees are earning the same, this speaks to the value of doing things differently; providing a different way for candidates to enter the market with skill sets and an organisational fit based on experience and not solely degrees.”
Real-world IT skills delivery
Hawkey believes accountability will play an important role in an industry-wide adoption of this approach.
“We contract for the delivery of work we produce for our clients’ businesses. We don’t get paid if our candidates do not deliver real-world results and real-world solutions to our corporate clients in the second six months of the one-year programme. This means our bread and butter is not solely training; it’s delivering work that produces real business benefits into our partner organisations.
“We’re seeing skills integration as a service (SIaaS) – the bedrock of our academy – truly come into its own. But companies need to do it with an organisation that knows how to deliver SIaaS. This means all the administration around QCTO qualifications, managing workplace knowledge, customised skill sets, and all of the experience and delivery into their IT teams. Companies just need to make a decision on a one-off spend redirect, to have this entire strategic element taken care of, and future proof their businesses.”
As a managed service, redAcademy manages every aspect of the integration during the year’s worth of training in the client’s ecosystem.
This means businesses can focus on delivering to their customers instead of spending time and money getting a new recruit to a point where they can start adding value.
Hawkey says, “Everything changes when a skilled tech professional starts day one of their employment fully immersed in live projects and the business culture.”
Traditional education struggling to keep up
That technology changes and moves at a rapid pace, is a given. But to get an idea of just how quickly the landscape is shifting: the integration of AI into at least one business function in global organisations surged from 55 percent in 2023 to 72 percent in 2024.
Career Junction Employment Insights 2024/Q4 notes a skills shift in the tech hiring landscape with a pivot away from new systems building, towards the integration and streamlining of technologies.
While software development is still the most recruited tech role, there has been an upsurge in AI, cloud computing and security, and data-driven roles with an increasing focus on infrastructure optimisation and data utilisation.
Organisations like redAcademy, in partnership with corporate customers, are using business-education models that allow them to respond quickly to rapid changes in the technology ecosystem, and adjust training accordingly, to match real-world needs.
Hawkey says,
“We’re in the process of adding project management, cybersecurity, and AI developer programmes to our existing offering of software development, software tester, test automation, and data science practitioner programmes. The new additions are the result of listening to market demands and expanding on our proven success in training our candidates on clients’ live software projects, immersing them in existing workflows and preferred technology stacks as they deliver their IT projects ahead of schedule and at the organisations’ expected quality levels.”
In light of the worsening IT skills gap crisis, the National Planning Commission’s report on South Africa’s Digital Readiness for the Fourth Industrial Revolution has recommended several key areas of focus that include: improving the quality of education to equip students with up-to-date skills, specifically soft skills; aligning technical and vocational education and training programmes with industry needs to provide technical skills, soft skills, and cognitive skills; and collaborating with industries to design and update qualifications and certifications that align with their needs.
Hawkey agrees:
“South Africans need opportunities to swap the campus for a meeting room, and exchange three years of traditional education for one year of experiential learning. Our young people need to earn [6.7 million children live in households where no adults earn income from employment]. So, we help them swap a qualification for a career, change theory into practical knowledge, and move into the job market without delay by creating working solutions and using the most relevant coding languages for real customers in our IT industry network.”
