Johannesburg - South Africa has won the “Skills Development Programme of the Year” at the National Outsourcing Association (NOA) Professional Awards in London.
The NOA Outsourcing Professional Awards celebrate the individuals and teams that have added the most value to their companies, partners and the global outsourcing industry over the past year.
“The Outsourcing Professional Awards is an outstanding event highlighting the best in outsourcing. I was delighted to see the variety of organisations represented and how well they networked and their willingness to share learning and experience. The Awards showed the immense depth and range of talent and capability in the outsourcing industry,” said Chris Halward, director of professional development at the National Outsourcing Association.
The Skills Award was one of the most hotly contested categories at this year’s event with South Africa competing against leaders in the BPO space which included Tata Consulting Services (joint winners), Capita and BPS Tech Mahindra.
“This is fantastic news for the industry as skills development is currently our major focus area. In recent years South Africa has made a name for itself as a BPO/Offshoring location of choice which has led to an influx of foreign investment. This has resulted in large scale job creation with over 9 000 new offshore jobs being created since 2011. This growth is expected to increase even further and by 2015, it is projected that a further 7 000 jobs could be created,” said Gareth Pritchard, CEO of BPeSA.
According to Stats SA, the unemployment rate in South Africa is currently at 25.5%, while unemployment among the country’s youth (15 to 34) has risen to 36.2%.
“The high unemployment rate in South Africa creates opportunities for rapidly growing sectors such as ours. There is a large pool of talent, eager to learn, in this country. It is just a case of finding these individuals and training them”, added Pritchard.
“BPeSA is currently working on developing a skills academy which will look to assist in the training of 10 000 new agents and 1 000 team leaders over the next three years. This initiative, along with existing skills programmes in South Africa such as Monyetla and Harambee, has to date successfully trained over 10 000 unemployed individuals,” said Nomzamo Ramutla, human capital manager of BPeSA.
BPeSA has also recently entered into partnership agreements with the Rockefeller Foundation and Microsoft with both skills based initiatives expected to be launched in 2015.
Ramutla indicated that other initiatives, such as weekend skills boot camps, where learners use their time on weekends to get high impact training from trainers and executives across industry, have also started to make an impact.
“This is an exciting time for skills development in our industry. We have developed strategic relationships with key figures in both the private and public sector, which in the long term will help ensure that the supply of talent is able to meet the growing demands of the industry,” added Ramutla.
- Fin24