Skills Gap Strands South Africa Business as Jobs Go Unfilled
- Businesses need engineers, architects, software developers
- Education system must adapt to high-tech economy: Ex-FNC CEO
This article is for subscribers only.
As chief executive officer of South Africa’s First National Bank, Michael Jordaan moved the lender into the tech era by persuading customers to manage their accounts online. One of his biggest challenges was finding enough software developers.
“At the time we had severe shortages in IT, especially for coders in new programming languages like Java,” Jordaan, who’s now a venture capitalist and is investing in training coders at Project CodeX, which he co-founded, said in an interview from Cape Town. “Products like alarm clocks, maps, newspapers, CDs are all becoming apps and it takes coders to produce them.”