Covid-19 has stress tested South African companies of all sizes. In particular, the SMME market has been hard hit. Revenues were decimated during lockdown as customers went online or stopped purchasing altogether. To survive, companies have had to build or upgrade their e-commerce and online customer service offerings. This can put SMMEs at a big disadvantage as they struggle to access the tech talent and capital necessary to build their online presence.
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South Africa has an acute ICT skills shortage. This affects companies of all sizes, but particularly SMMEs who cannot compete with the banks and other large employers to secure the few ICT professionals in the market.
To address this shortage, Umuzi has been working with leading employers across the country to build a digital talent pipeline for web development, data science, data engineering, UI design, digital copywriting and UX strategy.
Andrew Levy, MD of Umuzi says: “The 500+ amazing young people we have already placed into full-time jobs through our skills development programmes proves that young South Africans are ready and able to fill the tech skills shortage, if given the chance.”
Umuzi, with the support of its corporate partners, has launched the Digital Talent Pipeline Programme. They are offering SMMEs access to top junior developers for a three-month trial period, at a subsidised rate. SMMEs will need to contribute just R3,500 a month for three months, thereafter, they can reassess whether or not they want to take the digital talent full-time.
The young people on this programme have already been training on the job for the last 12 months in distributed teams, and know how to work remotely following Agile best practices.
SMMEs that would like to try this talent should please contact , Umuzi’s employer partnership manager. He is ready to match employers to talented young developers based on their tech stack and business needs.
Meet some of the Umuzi talent
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Sibusiso Fikizolo
Data Scientist
Sibusiso loves rugby, specifically the 7s format of the game. He particularly enjoys 7s strategy and numbers. “The data being collected on every team and player in the modern game is insane. I dream of doing analysis in Python to predict the winners,” shares Sibusiso. He has a great knack for telling stories through data and has been helping build a number of dashboards including Umuzi’s recruitment funnel that selects the strongest candidates for the programme. This passionate team player comes highly recommended by his managers and colleagues. He is proficient in Python, Git, Basic Linux, Machine Learning, Data Wrangling, Juypter notebook, Pandas and Dash Plotly.
Check out Sibusiso’s Github portfolio here.
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Siphiwe Mahlangu
Data Scientist
Siphiwe is a data scientist with experience in the finance and edtech industry. At Umuzi, he has been working on the candidate recommender product team, using machine learning to predict the success of the ±15,000 candidates who apply to Umuzi every year.
He is proficient in Python, Git, R, basic statistics: probability, statistical inference, machine learning: data wrangling and feature selection, simple and multiple linear regression, logistic regression, decision trees, K-means Python, Jupyter Notebooks (Anaconda), Pandas, Numpy, sklearn and statsmodels.
Check out his Github portfolio here.
Find out more information on how Umuzi recruits can transform your tech talent pipeline by contacting Brett or visiting Umuzi’s Hire Talent page.
