The days of being able to qualify with an entry-level certification from an industry player and being able to walk into a job are fast drawing to a close. Instead, companies are looking for people who have a much deeper understanding of the underlying architectural aspects of information technology.
That’s the view of Dimension Data Africa and Middle East CEO Derek Wilcocks, who says fundamental shifts in recent years in the way the IT industry works — particularly the move to automation — are changing the types of IT skills that are prized by employers.
“If you can learn something from a manual in three weeks to do the job, a machine can do the same thing. Machines can literally read manuals, absorb their content and use that content to solve problems,” says Wilcocks. “And when the machine can’t do something, it will refer to a human being, and will learn from the human being and be able to do it the next time around.”
People who understand how the technology architecture fits together will have the most marketable skills, and South Africans looking for opportunities in the IT sector need to consider this.
“There is a significant skills shortage, but you will get an increased gap in the remuneration and market value between those that really understand how all this stuff fits together and those who are following a routine set of tasks,” he says. “Those following a routine set of tasks will find that automation will start to impact on their employability.”
Wilcocks cites the example of a new managed service for data centres, which Dimension Data recently rolled out for a client in Asia. “Within three weeks, 75% of the calls to the call centre were being resolved without any human intervention,” he says. “This has a significant impact on how you think about designing IT services.”
Increasingly, IT services are being automated at scale, Wilcocks says. “It’s happening at an industrialised scale. And it changes the way you design products – how do you build multiple managed services to take advantage of the same platform you have globally at scale?”
It’s also changing the way companies approach outsourcing. Now, with a significant volume of tasks being automated, often with the workload shifted into the cloud, there has been a big shift in the way traditional outsourcing contracts are structured, he says. “It starts to create a lot more agility and flexibility in the business world. Despite all the changes in the 20 years I’ve been involved in IT, the starting point for an enterprise services agreement has always been how many full-time equivalents (people) you need. We’re now dealing with a completely different concept.”
Dimension Data, which employs 28 000 people worldwide, is actively helping its employees learn new skills. For example, the company offers an internal platform of online training content, which, Wilcocks says, is being used much more now than it was in the past.
It is also recruiting “aggressively” in particular areas, specifically in its cloud computing and enterprise services practices. “We have a global team looking to find those skills, separated from our normal recruitment process. It’s a globalised hunt for talent.” — © 2015 NewsCentral Media
