At the beginning of the year, a report stated that the skills shortage is so critical in South Africa that companies were looking elsewhere for the skills that they need. In other words, they were preferring to import skills rather than invest locally in skills development. The industries that were the hardest hit were Information Communication Technologies (ICT) and engineering.
Developing skills in SA
Government has seen this problem and is attempting to do something about this skills shortage which is currently being experienced in South Africa. For example, it has emphasised skills development in Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE). This means that if your company invests in skills development, especially for historically disadvantaged individuals, you may be awarded more B-BBEE points as opposed to an organisation who doesn’t make this investment.
In addition, the employers who pay over a certain amount in salaries and wages have to pay 1% of their turnover as a Skills Development Levy (SDL). These monies are collected by the Sectoral Education and Training Authorities (SETAs) and registered companies may claim from this fund for courses which are accredited with the SETA that they belong to.
Why skills development is necessary in the digital marketing space?
The world is going digital very, very rapidly. As a natural by-product, people are starting to favour shopping online as opposed to at shopping centres. We can see this in the stats:
- It is predicted that global retail e-commerce sales will reach US$4.5 trillion by 2021. (According to the current exchange rate, that’s about R62 trillion.) This is not a far-fetched figure as in 2017 global e-commerce sales stood at US$2.3 trillion (about R32 trillion).
This means that to reach online shoppers, marketing needs to switch from traditional marketing to digital marketing.
However, as we said in the first paragraph of this article, digital skills are reportedly lacking in South Africa. This means that a massive push needs to happen in terms of skills development in digital marketing.