Bridging Tech Learning for Future Careers in 2024

There is no shortage of programmes that aim to teach young people skills for careers in technology. However, a lot of these programmes risk being skills factories that supply a product that no one is interested in. In this case, training young people in ICT without really understanding if any employer would hire them or even if those employers have an incentive to hire them. In this article I will focus on technology education and the bridge between it and the world of work, focusing mainly on adult education for young people. Several considerations and recommendations will be made from the need to study policies to the need to understand the technology labour market and finally, the need to design programmes (such as academies and bootcamps) that prioritise learning in and through work.

Identify policy opportunities and gaps

Policies are there to plug the holes that the market cannot solve on its own. We know that there is a demand for tech skills across Africa, but somehow, at least in South Africa, there is a mass of unemployed ICT graduates or even young people with skills that are transferable to the tech sector. So clearly, simply arming young people with tech skills will not ensure that they will get hired. This is why, when designing technology education programmes, you need to consider which policies exist that can help you to secure employment for the beneficiaries of your programmes. For example, are there policies that incentivise businesses to hire young people or even those that motivate companies to hire diverse and previously disadvantaged individuals? These are the first considerations you must make when creating technology education programmes/academies/boot camps whose aim is also to secure employment for the students and/or beneficiaries.

In the absence of taking advantage of such policies, then your programme will be designed off naivety about the demand that exists in the market and whether that demand translates to a mass absorption of the skills for which you are training. In some cases, this is manifestly not true. There is a myriad of considerations businesses must make before hiring young people just for the certificates that they possess. The biggest one is the risk of hiring an inexperienced individual, and this is what some policies target and aim to alleviate – this risk appetite. So, research these policies and align your programme to their tenets, in order to experience the greatest chance of securing employment for your beneficiaries, following your training and educational intervention.

Scope the market for relevant skills

This recommendation is simple enough and it is based on the capitalist orthodox that because there is a demand, all we need to do is supply skilled workers. However, as discussed in the previous chapter, simply supplying skills is not enough to ensure that those skilled youth are absorbed into the tech labour market. The demand for tech skills is often more nuanced than just ensuring that young people can code. The programming language matters for the industry or even specific organisations that the young person aspires to work in. Knowledge of cloud deployment and development or even cyber security are even more examples of niche ICT skills that are in demand and that supply would need to align with.

Simply teaching baseline tech skills that are outdated is a recipe for disaster as far as tech educational interventions are concerned. In this case, the supply will be mismatched to the demand in the market, and the beneficiaries of the programme will be set up for failure. Part of the work that we do at CAPACITI, is to design curriculums in collaboration with the line managers of our client partners who will be absorbing our candidates (students), to ensure that what we supply to them fills the skills-shaped gap in their workforce. Therefore, take the time to sit down with industry players to understand what they need and anticipate what they will need in the future, as opposed to designing programmes that could create a mismatch.

Provide opportunities for learning in and through work

The last point to make regarding designing tech educational interventions meant to prepare young people for the workplace is to provide them with opportunities to gain experience in and through work. Theory is extremely important and should never be stripped down for the sake of rushing through a programme. Equally, practice should be prioritised, especially that which gives technically trained students more well-rounded business knowledge. A case-study and projects-based approach to teaching technology will provide beneficiaries with work experience and the opportunity to blend work and learning. Teaching technical skills in some instances is the easy part. Teaching students how to apply those skills and to think about the role of technology more broadly, is the biggest challenge and the most rewarding part.

Most importantly, allowing room for deep reflection of the role and impact of technology on organisations, and nurturing that reflective habit, can make a programme even richer. This can be done with facilitators and even through fireside chats with industry managers. These reflections should be designed to foster and reward critical thinking and the acquisition of business knowledge, by technical professionals.

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So, if you are to take anything from this article, it is that technology educational interventions and programmes meant to bridge the gap between education and work, are more than just skills factories. From their very design, these programmes need to be fed by policy considerations and what the opportunities and gaps presented by policy are. Then, we need to look at the market and what its demands are, before designing work/case-rich programmes that nurture the application of skills as well as deeply reflective practices around the role and value of technology to organisations. This article is the logical follow-up to my exploration of the ICT skills paradox, which can be found here, and will be followed by an outline of the advantages of on-shoring ICT jobs to Africa in my next article. We need to move forward from a demand-supply mismatch, and a skills saturation model, to a more calculated and coordinated education-to-work nexus and pipeline.