Ezulwini- Eswatini’s technology sector is facing a widening mismatch between the skills employers need and the qualifications being produced by the country’s education and training system, with businesses increasingly looking for practical competencies and industry-recognised certifications rather than academic qualifications alone.
Business Eswatini Chief Executive Officer E.Nathi Dlamini said the disconnect was evident in the country’s ICT labour market, where employers were struggling to find people with the specific technical abilities required to fill available roles.
Dlamini was speaking during the ICT Validation workshop hosted by Skills for Youth (S4Y) held at the Royal Villas on Thursday, where stakeholders were presented with findings on the country’s ICT skills demand and supply.
He said an assessment of employer demand had already identified substantial opportunities within a relatively small number of companies consulted, but these opportunities were not necessarily translating into employment because businesses were struggling to access the right skills.
“There’s huge amounts of demand just within the small amounts of companies that I met, and they are struggling to get the right people into those organizations,” Dlamini noted.
He said some of the demand was coming from parastatals that needed ICT personnel but did not have vacancies or budgets available within their human resources structures to employ them directly. Other businesses, particularly smaller companies, had indicated that they would take on additional ICT professionals once they secured contracts that would allow them to expand.
According to Dlamini, the assessment identified potential demand for dozens of ICT roles across participating organizations, illustrating what he described as a lag between the demand for skills and the ability of businesses to absorb those skills into formal employment.
The findings also raised questions about where companies source their ICT professionals.
Dlamini said an analysis of LinkedIn data showed that most ICT professionals visible on the professional networking platform had followed the traditional university route, while there was little evidence of graduates from public technical and vocational education and training institutions, commonly referred to as TIBET, progressing into professional ICT roles.
He cautioned that this did not mean TVET graduates were not employed, but said the data pointed to a gap in the transition from technical training into professional employment.
“What we aren’t seeing is the transition from graduating from those institutions into a professional role,” he said.
The problem, he added, was compounded by the fact that some of the more specialized ICT skills demanded by businesses were being sourced outside Eswatini.
Dlamini cited SAP, Salesforce, software architecture and software-as-a-service roles as examples of skills that companies often sourced from South Africa because the expertise was not readily available locally.
He said Eswatini companies were consequently developing some of their basic ICT capabilities locally before bringing in more senior or specialized expertise from outside the country.
“We do the support and networking, and then we re-export the senior skills instead of creating spaces or creating those skills locally,” Dlamini said.
He challenged businesses and stakeholders involved in the S4Y initiative to provide better information on how companies actually recruit, saying there was currently insufficient data on whether employers relied primarily on recruitment agencies, online job boards, professional networks or other channels.
Dlamini said understanding where companies begin their search when a vacancy arises would be critical to closing the gap between young people seeking employment and businesses looking for skills.
He also called for closer links between businesses and education institutions, arguing that young people should be exposed to workplaces before they graduate.
“We need to bring business closer to the education institutions,” he said, adding that greater interaction could help expose students to the realities of the workplace and improve the transition from education into employment.
But perhaps the most significant finding, according to Dlamini, was the growing importance of skills and competencies over qualifications alone.
The employer assessment identified data analytics, software engineering, cybersecurity, software development, software application programming interfaces and no-code technologies among the ICT job families showing strong demand.
ICT support and networking also remained important areas of employment, while DevOps was identified as another emerging area.
Dlamini said employers were increasingly looking for specific technical competencies that were often not apparent from a conventional academic qualification.
In data analytics, for example, he identified SQL, Python, Power BI and Excel as core skills that employers were looking for. He said these competencies would also be important as businesses increasingly adopted artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.
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