There is currently a mass exodus of talent from South Africa for a myriad of reasons, least of which is the fact that there is a massive shortage of viable employment opportunities. Let’s not mention the headache of loadshedding and/or water shortage depending on where you are in the country.

Who wouldn’t want to be able to live anywhere and not have to worry about the stigma attached to having the infamous ‘green mamba’ South African passport?

Gen Zs relate to the world differently in that having been raised on social media, they consider themselves digital nomads so why should they be confined to rands when they could be earning euros or dollars anywhere in the world?

Fast forward to a landscape where there is a massive need for specific digital talent within South Africa and globally. This need for talent comes in the form of SAP, very closely followed by AWS and Google Cloud who have just docked on our shores.

Why would we not flip this on its head and start competing in this market? There is an opportunity for us to take the raw talent that we have in South Africa, close the gap that exists for entry level jobs with a training programme that on boards, prepares, mentors and instills critical skills for the individual. This then transitions into real workplace experience and then further learning interventions going forward. We can do this through carefully curated courses that are modulised and that use the peer led learning methodology. This is where the learner acquires the knowledge and then assimilates it in a workplace experience. From there, we can start preparing and developing a pool of talent in South Africa that international companies come fishing in as we have just the right ‘bait’.

When we Saffas (as we are often fondly known) migrate overseas, we do have a reputation for being exceptionally hard workers as well as innovative. If we coupled this with providing young talent with the right skills in the right environment, we not only would have an unstoppable workforce but we will also have a phenomenal story to tell. We can start creating earning opportunities in an arena that we, up to now have been struggling to compete in, but we would also enable and empower a new workforce to become financially independent.

South Africa is well known in the BPO space and that is evident in the number of outsourced call centres that we have on our shores. There has been a lot of time, money and effort put into developing this arena and the skills needed to run it.  The development of the digital talent exporter would allow us to add to this pot and increase the contribution to the growth of our economy. This is something that we are currently doing well and can use to jumpstart this sector.

We all know that it takes a village to raise a child and in the same vein, no one entity can do this alone. There has been a lot of work done in the past decade to uplift, upskill and empower the entry workforce of South Africa.

For example, Harambee was early on the landscape, a business working as a youth talent accelerator. They found talented young people and helped them articulate their value through better CVs, interview training, creating a platform where young people could be found. Companies working on transformation with skills gaps leveraged them and they did well. The presidency recently asked Harambee to play a wider role by becoming an ecosystem shaper, to bring other private sectors into play to help create the future orchestra of talent. BPESA are a part of this play, bringing to market a Future Skills Platform. The idea is that learning content, much of it free can be brought together to enable learning.

Companies like Digilink are joining the party, connecting prepared talent to business process outsourcing opportunities, with an incubator stance, embedding pods of talent with customers ready to leverage skills.

We decided to look into it, to explore rates, ways of working and the nature of international demand. Business process outsourcing was an immediate click. Deep studies done by strategic partners such as Harambee, BPESA and Digilink generally revealed that South African call centre agents and remote workers are highly prized for positive customer outcomes.

Previously outsourcing was seen as a cost game, with centres of expertise arising in India, the East and South America. However, culture influences how we behave on a call. These more process-driven cultures can achieve compliance and other KPIs. However, our own home-brew cares about the customer outcome and happiness, an intangible that is elusively more valuable.

As a learning organisation, we found ourselves uniquely positioned to explore what it takes to prepare talent for these opportunities. From emergent Amazon web services to South African headquartered corporates, there is huge interest in how to tap into our own unique Gen Z. Our secret recipe seems to be our ability to develop peer-led learning journeys. Opportunities to move beyond the theory of school and academic qualification into practical opportunity.

Empanda is a learning and change management organisation. We create transformational journeys, developing content and creating experiences that help people to engage, enable and evolve pathways forward. Empanda has developed a SHINE learning experience designed to help talent become ready for the workplace, entering the marketplace as learning and change professionals. Our wider value proposition is to create custom learning journeys that enable talent for a specific job opportunity. Business Process Outsourcing is just one such opportunity.

Let us know if you’d like to learn more about our journey management to accelerate fresh talent.

How would you go about positioning South Africa as a Digital Talent exporter?