South Africa: Looking Abroad to Bridge the Skills Gap

THE Standard Bank is expanding its recruitment campaigns to suck in talent from India because it cannot find enough information technology staff locally. It has up to 100 vacancies to fill instantly and will need 300 recruits by the end of the year, including programmers, project managers and business analysts. Last year it hired 600 IT staff, and its total of 2500 means its in-house IT department eclipses many of SA's specialist IT groups……………
"We want to try to complement our IT shop with Indian resources. We are always looking at the South African market, and we need to look beyond our borders," he says…………………………
He expects many other local firms will follow suit to combat the skills crunch. The number of students studying IT at universities in SA, Europe and the US has decreased for three years, so the skills base is depleting. In comparison, India pumps out about 400000 IT graduates a year. [View Full Article]