{"id":28180,"date":"2019-08-13T11:53:30","date_gmt":"2019-08-13T10:53:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/?p=28180"},"modified":"2019-08-13T12:01:02","modified_gmt":"2019-08-13T11:01:02","slug":"skills-development-crucial-to-economic-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/2019\/08\/13\/skills-development-crucial-to-economic-success\/","title":{"rendered":"Skills development crucial to economic success"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Despite having a youth unemployment rate of more than 50% South Africa has a skills shortage in many areas of commerce, one of which is in technology. Therefore, Michael Shapiro, CEO at Synthesis, explains why skills development is crucial to economic success.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What exacerbates the problem is that South\nAfrican banks have understood the need to digitise, and that not doing so will\nplaces the institution at risk. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rate of change is also a significant\nfactor. The result is that there simply no time to train people for the roles\nthat are required. According to Alpheus Mangale, the Group Chief Information\nOfficer at Standard Bank, his firm was particularly struggling in trying to\nfill positions that did not exist just a few years ago \u2013 such as cloud\nengineers. As a result, he said that banks can expect to pay a \u201820-30% premium\u2019\nwhen they do find such skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The good news\nis that the banks and other financial institutions need not panic. Along with\nglobal trends, these enterprises should adjust their thinking and view\noutsourcing as a solution to this dilemma. Over the last two decades, Synthesis\nSoftware Technologies has seen more and more corporates and finance houses\nadopting this approach. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The advantage\nfor them is the talent pool is constantly being upskilled, can leverage off the\nsignificant expertise in the field and can provide the best of breed skills\nwith minimal overheads and low barrier to entry. Specialised requirements can\nbe co-sourced into the banks\u2019 teams with ease. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In terms of the\nindustry as a whole, technology companies contribute significantly to the\ntraining, up-skilling and mentoring of the broader talent pool, which ultimately\nwill contribute to the solving of the challenge. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The launch of\nnew industry players, Discovery, TymeBank and others will undoubtedly increase\nthe pressure on the more established tier 1 banks. However rather than panic\nand try and \u2018grab\u2019 whatever skills come their way, I believe that the\noutsourcing of skills is an elegant and sensible option. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This doesn\u2019t mean that companies like Synthesis have an endless option of trained people to choose from when looking to employ. On the contrary. At Synthesis, we are deeply cognisant of the fact that many of our team might have skills in some technological areas, but not in others. In today\u2019s competitive and demanding environment, this is not enough. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Michael Shapiro, CEO at Synthesis<\/strong> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Our team is\nexpected to be able to communicate effectively and have an understanding of\nethical standards and morph comfortably from a \u2018tech\u2019 environment to the\nenvironment of a financial institution. We understand that very few are born\nwith this capability, which is why staff training, mentoring and upskilling is\nvery much part of the culture and not an addition to it. Broader than the\ninternal capability, we have launched the Synthesis Academy, which provides\noutcomes-driven onsite training. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Facilitators\nare among the region\u2019s leading technology professionals. In addition to theory,\nwe do provide practical skills to our customers and have social forums for\ncourse discussion and mentoring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Specialist\nemerging technologies, such as cloud, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning\nchange how your business operates, innovates, responds and scales. These are\nall offered at the Academy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The skills\nshortage in South Africa along with the unemployment crises presents both the\nsolution and the challenge. Although we cannot fix the national crises on our\nown, at Synthesis we are confident that in our own way, we are working to make\na difference. One person at a time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Despite having a youth unemployment rate of more than 50% South Africa has a skills shortage in many areas of commerce, one of which is in technology. Therefore, Michael Shapiro, CEO at Synthesis, explains why skills development is crucial to economic success. What exacerbates the problem is that South African banks have understood the need […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":28184,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4950,565,134,182,843,367,328,6,19,183,9059,13],"tags":[496,10617,386,22,10618,10615,453,6377,10616,10620,10619],"class_list":["post-28180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-analysis","category-banking-finance","category-blog","category-cloud","category-editors-choice","category-education","category-features","category-insights","category-regional-news","category-software","category-south-africa","category-top-stories","tag-ai","tag-alpheus-mangale","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-cloud","tag-discovery","tag-michael-shapiro","tag-south-africa","tag-standard-bank","tag-synthesis","tag-synthesis-academy","tag-tymebank"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28180"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28187,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28180\/revisions\/28187"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}