Dear CEOs and CIOs
How much money is your company wasting in the annual scramble to meet its B-BBEE targets? Despite your calls for cost cutting, come the end of the year, B-BBEE consultants and training providers are inundated by calls from your HR or transformation departments, desperate to spend their budgets on literally anything that will tick the BEE box.
This is an awful waste, as these budgets could be better used to address one of your highest priority issues, the critical shortage of experienced tech talent. Here’s how you can use existing incentives to build a high-value, scarce skills talent pipeline, create jobs, and boost the economy.
Make training demand-driven
Make sure your company spends its skills development and YES budgets upskilling young people in scarce, high-value skills your business actually needs. There are many programmes tackling youth unemployment and training existing staff. Unfortunately too few are demand-driven.
We recommend you start with full-stack web developers, software testers, and data engineers. You’re already fighting a war for this talent and it’s going to get worse. MyBroadband’s 2019 IT Salary Survey revealed that 46% of South African IT professionals are planning to emigrate, or work abroad, in the near future.
You’re likely paying hand over fist for these scarce tech skills in the market, and if you’re like the big financial services companies, outsourcing and offshoring to the tune of millions of rands a month. You can save money, reduce your reliance on providers, and your foreign exchange exposure by developing your own talent pipeline.
Despite B-BBEE incentives, your companies continue to under-invest in junior talent. Why?
You are focussed on hiring experienced tech talent, rather than juniors, in order to deliver on your immediate business needs. In the short-run, hiring juniors, who need support to come up to speed, can slow down delivery. Rather than losing time training your own teams, you end up outsourcing or offshoring many of your urgent software development needs.
Here’s what you should do next:
Create a pool of junior developers subsidised by enterprise development and the DTi’s BPO incentives to get them up to speed doing real work on your tech stack. This should ensure they are cost comparable with offshoring, and more importantly, give these young South Africans the opportunity they need to become experienced tech professionals.
It’s time for you, our executives, to show leadership and be more strategic with your companies’ B-BBEE spend. A closer look at how your B-BBEE budgets are spent can create a sustainable tech talent pipeline, create jobs, and get our economy growing.