Upskilling SA’s Kids

According to ITWeb, Google SA officially launched an initiative to upskill over 30,000 primary and high school leaners through its computer science programme, CS First, which is an educator-created programme to equip learners with the fundamentals of computer science, and make coding easy to teach and fun to learn. ITWeb points out that it is well-documented that SA faces a digital skills gap, with government, private sector and industry commentators calling for an increased focus on skills development to take the country through the next digital revolution.

Google says that it is also looking at other ways to assist in addressing the country’s digital skills gap, and develop a culture of young African tech creators and digital innovators.

In a separate initiative, the ‘WeThinkCode’ coding academy has unveiled WomenThinkCode=  in partnership with theMomentum Metropolitan Foundation and MWR InfoSecurity.

Meanwhile, a damming report by 3 leading companies – the  Boston Consulting Group (BCG), WorldSkills Russia and Rosatom – claims that the skills of nearly 55% of people working in South Africa are redundant or inadequate for the position they are in. This is above the 50% global average. The report points out that the world economy is estimated to lose US$ 5 trillion from inadequate training of workers. It is claimed that human-centric skills development can boost GDP growth by up to 2%. The report, “Mission Talent– Mass Uniqueness: A Global Challenge for One Billion Workers”,  identifies new ways for governments and employers to address the growing skills crisis and boost economies. It was presented this month to the World Skills Conference 2019 in Kazan. The report estimates that by 2030, 1.4 billion workers will not have the right skills for their jobs. As we have reported previously in this Newsletter, a third of all existing professions are expected to change by 2035 with the expansion of IT, AI and robots.