In July 2016, Statistics South Africa put the unemployment figures for the first quarter of 2016 on the proverbial table. They were not a pretty sight. Employed people had gone down by 0.2%, which seems small enough as percentages go, but translated into around 15 000 people losing their jobs. Many of these were not exclusively as a result of the economy dipping in response to political insanity; most were thanks to limited skill-sets and the inability to grow these sustainably.

“The skills shortage in the ICT sector is a perennial feature and our situation is probably worse than it needs to be because of poor policy implementation, following many decades of excluding the majority of the population,” says Adrian Schofield, manager of the Joburg Centre for Software Engineering’s (JCSE) Applied Research Unit.