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Johannesburg - A lack of improvement in South Africa’s basic education system is putting the country at risk of falling behind its African peers with regard to information and communications technology (ICT).
This is according to Adrian Schofield who is the Manager for the Applied Research Unit at the Joburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE).
Schofield on Tuesday delivered a talk on the sixth JCSE ICT Skills Survey, which gathered data from an online questionnaire completed by the likes of managers responsible for ICT functions and practitioners in the sector.
And results from the countrywide survey indicate that 45% of corporate respondents said South Africa’s skill shortage is having a major effect on their business. Meanwhile, 14% of corporate respondents said the skills crisis is threatening their organisations' viability.
South Africa’s average student reading score, for example, has scored tenth out of 15 African countries, according to data from the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ). SACMEQ has also placed South Africa’s average student mathematics score at position eight out of fifteen African countries.
“We have still an enormous failure in our basic education system,” Schofield told attendees.
“The government itself in the approach to technology has failed quite seriously,” Schofield added.
As a result, Schofield said South Africa is losing its technology leadership status on the continent because of limited numbers of matriculants and graduates in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines and failed implementations of technology projects by government.
South Africa, for instance, does not have an ICT policy yet: a feature that other African countries such as Kenya have moved on already, Schofield said.
Last week, government opened up an ICT policy review process to study various options. But Schofield criticised this move as being too late.
“We shouldn't in 2014 be discussing it still,” Schofield said.
ICT survey’s other results
Further findings of the study include that 79% of ICT practitioners are male: a figure that has hardly changed since the survey started in 2008.
The study also found that the top five ICT priorities for corporate respondents are Software as a Service (SaaS) or cloud computing, network infrastructure, information security, application development and business intelligence.
Demand for programming languages in the corporate sector also remains similar to 2012 as the study revealed that Java is the most needed skill followed by C#, .NET, C++ and Visual Basic (VB).
