Data published by Statistics South Africa at the end of March this year showed that the country’s official unemployment rate rose 0.4 percentage points to a record 35.3% in the fourth quarter of last year. Couple that with an ailing economy that’s seemingly worsening and the outlook for the country’s youth looks quite bleak at first glance. South Africa’s redAcademy, however, is one organisation that’s taking the skills and unemployment crises head-on. They’re on a mission to fast-track careers in the real world, through what they term a career sprint, that’s destined to narrow the gap between skills and opportunities.
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High school graduates will now be able to fast-track their IT careers thanks to the launch of redAcademy.
They will also have access to relevant and up-to-date skills development as well as on the job training to guarantee employment if they complete the year.
redAcademy MD, Jessica Carroll, says that the academy’s mission is to provide real opportunities for young people while developing a sustainable pipeline of employable software developers to benefit redPanda Software, its clients and the IT industry at large.
Software development is a growing field that is expected to be even more critical in the future than it is today. According to the Global Developer Population and Demographic Study by Evans Data Corporation, the number of software developers worldwide is expected to grow to 27.7 million in 2023.
Software is a set of instructions, data or programs used to operate computers and execute specific tasks. It is the opposite of hardware, which describes the physical aspects of a computer. Software is a generic term used to refer to applications, scripts and programs that run on a device.
Despite the growth in the industry, this has not been mirrored by the number of software developers coming out of tertiary institutions: software development is still listed as a scarce skill. And, while the jobs are in fact out there, the challenge now is to fill those jobs with candidates in order to maintain and develop the momentum for the growth to continue.
