South Africa’s digital skills gap has steadily grown from a valley to a canyon over the last few years, with many graduates lacking the basic and critical skills needed in the workplace.

And it is not just the ICT sector that is not able to meet key digital skills demands.

Organisations across multiple industries are struggling to find the right digital skills needed to enable digital innovation, support recovery from the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, and drive future growth.

There are several contributing factors within the training environment that have accelerated the ICT skills gap in South Africa. The lack of training springs from the absence of relevant skilling programmes, a reluctance by employers to invest in training and resistance to training by employees. This is further complicated by the ICT environment’s rapidly changing dynamics which makes the need to upskill workers even more important to keep up with modern technologies.

Watch well known news anchor, Bongiwe Zwane at the Business Day Dialogues in partnership with Accenture as we set out to unpack why we have the problem. We also spent the larger part of the discussion on how the private sector can come up with the solution together with government to accelerate the skills upliftment process. We ventured into what the results should look like if we reach some degree of equilibrium.