Software Development has been identified as one of South Africa’s scarce skills. Jessica Hawkey, Managing Director at redAcademy, says: “there is a mismatch in the skills and opportunities available.” Teaching from static content has become outdated. “Software and Software Development is changing at such a rapid pace that tertiary institutions’ content and teachings are far removed from what is happening in the live working environment,” she says.
George Asamani, business development lead” Africa, for the Project Management Institute (PMI), says the IT Industry can help address this shortage by embracing citizen developers. “PMI believes that structured citizen development programmes open the IT development field to everyone including women.” It allows people without formal IT qualifications to build applications through cloud-based, low-code/no-code platforms. PMI’s partner universities get free access to Citizen Developer courseware. At present, there are no South African partner universities.
Jessica Hawkey says the redAcademy was designed to fast-track young people’s software development careers. Incubated out of enterprise retail software development company redPanda Software, redAcademy offers matriculants experiential learning and exposure to live client projects. This includes ongoing support and mentorship from those in software developer roles so that these students enter the workplace able to perform effectively immediately.
This article related to redAcademy and Software Development Careers, was published on Sunday Times
