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EDITOR’S QUESTION
JOHANN PRETORIUS,
DIRECTOR TRAINING,
SAP TRAINING AND
DEVELOPMENT INSTITUTE
A across Africa are making good progress
with preparing for the Fourth Industrial
Revolution, but access to relevant and work-
ready digital skills remain a challenge.
The first ‘always connected’ generation,
Millennials, is the best-educated in history,
which provides organisations of all kinds with
an immense pool of young talents. However,
today’s youth is still affected by high
unemployment rates. Youth unemployment
in South Africa has continued to increase,
reaching a shocking 52.9% according to the
World Bank. While it is clear that there is a skills gap and
we have insights on the current skill priorities,
in this everchanging Digital Era required
skillsets keep changing at a fast pace and in-
demand skills are not built overnight. South
Africa’s growing youth population poses
great opportunities for public and private
sector organisations to successfully tackle
current and potential future skills gaps – if
they join hands.
frica has the youngest population
in the world and it’s growing fast.
By 2055, the continent’s youth
population (aged 15–24), is expected to be
more than 450 million according to UNDP.
At the same time, nearly two-thirds of global
organisations admit to lacking the digital
skills they need to succeed. By next year,
more than 40 million high-skilled workers
will be needed globally. Organisations
“
ONE OF THE KEY
CHALLENGES
REGARDING THE
DIGITAL SKILLS
GAP IS THAT THE
RESPONSIBILITY
OF BUILDING THE
RIGHT SKILLS
IS NOT SHARED
BETWEEN
VARIOUS
STAKEHOLDERS.
www.intelligentcio.com
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One of the key challenges regarding the
digital skills gap is that the responsibility of
building the right skills is not shared between
various stakeholders. Enabling today’s and
tomorrow’s youth, our future leaders, cannot
be achieved by educational institutions only.
Skills development is a joint responsibility.
Only if individuals, public, private and
academic organisations work together
and create a constant dialogue, can we
close the current and future skills gap. On
the foundation of public-private-academic
partnerships, SAP has created initiatives
to drive digital skills build and create a
quadruple win: local youth find a job,
SAP customers and partners find brilliant
talent, SAP enhances its ecosystem and the
economies in these countries benefit in their
fight against youth unemployment.
SAP Skills for Africa is SAP Africa’s skills
development and job creation initiative to
tackle these pressing issues of our times. SAP
Skills for Africa is aimed at developing ICT
skills among African youth as part of SAP’s
global commitment to promoting education
and entrepreneurship, in line with SAP’s
support of the UN Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs). Two programmes, the SAP
Dual Study Program (DSP) and the SAP
Young Professional Program (YPP) are
offered under the auspices of the Skills for
Africa initiative.
SAP Skills for Africa gives SAP’s public and
private sector partners access to work-ready
talent that can drive Digital Transformation
within their organisations. At the same time,
this initiative supports young unemployed
or underemployed talents to kickstart their
careers and find meaningful work. The
training is just the start, the on-the-job
enablement at partnering organisations is
crucial to develop programme graduates into
the leaders of the future.
To date, more than 385 unemployed or
underemployed South African youth –
and more than 990 across Africa – have
graduated from the SAP Young Professional
Program as SAP Associate Consultants.
Through SAP’s close partnership with its
customers and industry partners, over 99%
of all programme graduates secure work
placement upon graduation.
INTELLIGENTCIO
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