Reducing Digital Skills' Gap in Africa - Quentyn Taylor

Quentyn Taylor chats to us about how to reduce the current digital skills' gap in Africa.
Plugging the gap – how businesses can resolve Europe’s digital skills shortage
Digital transformation is revolutionizing the European workplace, with its ability to streamline processes, reduce expenditure and enhance the service offering. Rapidly advancing digital technologies are already being used in hundreds of sectors, including farming, healthcare, transport, education, retail, home automation and logistics. The demand for information and communications technology specialists is growing fast – so much so that according to the European Commission, 9 out of 10 jobs in the future will require digital skills.
At the same time though, 169 million Europeans between 16 and 74 years – 44% – do not have basic digital skills. This means that the benefits that digitization can drive are quite literally under threat as Europe is failing to produce enough IT graduates. What’s worse is that as the pace of technological development snowballs, this gulf is widening. The prospect of 500,000 unfilled jobs in the European IT sector by 2020 is very real and looming.
Businesses cannot expect governments to tackle this crisis on their own. Firstly, disruptive and revolutionary innovations will always affect private companies before they affect the state – because businesses tend to try out new technologies before governments do. As a result, nobody understands the implications of and reasons for the digital skills gap better than the businesses that are directly suffering the consequences.
Secondly, with a capable and trained workforce, businesses stand to benefit enormously from digitization. Any organization, large or small, can contribute to tackling the growing digital skills gap, either by addressing it within their own function or by providing skills training more widely.

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