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Annual Conference of the Southern African Computer Lecturers' Association

SACLA 2018: ICT Education pp 108–123Cite as

Top IT Issues for Employers of South African Graduates

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Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 963))

Abstract

Technology trends and challenges in industry today are pressurising higher education institutions to rethink their curricula design, particularly for IT programmes. The World IT Project was designed to examine important issues confronting IT employers in many parts of the world. The purpose of this paper is to critically analyse the findings of a survey of South African IT employees, particularly related to the top technical and organisational IT issues faced by IT management and other IT staff. The results obtained were compared to those previously reported in earlier years, and to those of other countries that participated in the World IT Project. We found that the top technical and organisational issues in South Africa are not necessarily those receiving the most hype; rather, bread-and-butter issues such as reliable, efficient IT infrastructure or enterprise application integration are key concerns: issues often receiving insufficient attention in our academic curricula. Another important finding with educational policy implications is that the IT skills shortage is of much higher priority in South Africa than in the developed world; this highlights the need for additional resources in IT education.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Several papers on this topic can be found in the SACLA‘2018 post-proceedings: see this volume of CCIS.

  2. 2.

    Ethics-committee approval was obtained from our home universities as well as from the corporates who agreed to participate officially (i.e. by name) in this survey.

  3. 3.

    This is perhaps not surprising in a developing country.

  4. 4.

    For comparison see the ‘Invited Lecture’ of SACLA‘2018 in this volume of CCIS.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for IT and National Development, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

    Jean-Paul Van Belle

  2. Department of Computing Sciences, Nelson Mandela University, Port Elizabeth, South Africa

    Brenda Scholtz

  3. Department of Applied Information Systems, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Kennedy Njenga

  4. Faculty of Business Administration, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Canada

    Alexander Serenko

  5. Information Systems and Supply Chain Management, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA

    Prashant Palvia

Authors
  1. Jean-Paul Van Belle
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  2. Brenda Scholtz
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  3. Kennedy Njenga
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  4. Alexander Serenko
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  5. Prashant Palvia
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jean-Paul Van Belle .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Systems, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

    Salah Kabanda

  2. Computer Science, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Cape Town, South Africa

    Hussein Suleman

  3. University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

    Stefan Gruner

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Van Belle, JP., Scholtz, B., Njenga, K., Serenko, A., Palvia, P. (2019). Top IT Issues for Employers of South African Graduates. In: Kabanda, S., Suleman, H., Gruner, S. (eds) ICT Education. SACLA 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 963. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05813-5_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05813-5_8

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-05812-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-05813-5

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