Two reasons contributed to few native tech experts in Africa
There is an increase of technical graduates in many African
countries but the prevailing challenge remains getting proper
professionals with competitive skills and efficiency demanded by the
market. Knowledge which is gained through training is very essential in
building up professionalism but experience is inevitable in converting
it to expertise. Experience gained by continuing converting knowledge
gained through training to practices is vital in achieving the ultimate
goal.
African Information Technology sector comprised with a good number of vendors offering various solutions, These range from Microsoft, IBM, Huawei, ZTE, Cisco and many more. Solutions offered by these vendors requires good qualified people to plan, implement and operate the technology involved, Having someone specialized in dealing with a solution from one vendor or few gives a good opportunity to build him as an expert with the combination of special vendor training and experience.
Hence we have a number of Tanzanians although they are few as compared to those who are not in a position specializes in some technology solutions whom we can term them as experts, they spent themselves a good number of years on some specific solution or channel
Tanzania as a country still requires native experts, but there are notable challenges which resulted to failure or delay of getting them. Now the bad thing is these challenges form a cycle which resulted to long term absentees of professionals regardless of the good number of graduates in Technology.
The first noted challenge is the delivery nature of our trainings. Most university graduates and nowadays vocational graduates end up filled with only theoretical part of technical knowledge. A complete delivery of any technical education is supposed to involve practical but our training institutions does not emphasise on it due to mainly lack of fund in setting up complete labs with practice tools and sometimes just the nature of our syllabus not designed to accommodate some.
Now the issue becomes that most of the companies which may offer employment opportunities to these graduates strive to invest on latest and specialized technology solutions which not taught in practice at all during universities level therefore graduates become improper fits for the positions which requires someone with a certain expertize. Furthermore, they are even far back to be engaged to these solutions since they are not exposed to real industry solutions at all which studying as a result companies decided to develop only the already employed ones or employ someone from abroad to cover the gap. Since our training modality is not changing in early years and still there is a need for well equipped professionals with skills then this challenge will remain in place and the cycle continues
Now another notably challenge which causes the cycle for few native experts is the change of career. It is true that in order to be in a position of supporting a certain technology which offers a solution to a certain business users or have a certain business impact a technical guy must understand that business. For example an IT personnel who support bank users in using the core banking system must at least understands the concept behind credit and debit, A tech guy who plans, design and implement mobile money solution must have a good understanding of financial knowledge on reconciliation.
Although change of career can be a positive move but the issue becomes that these tech guys seems to fit so much in many other careers and sometimes turns to be easy to impress them to fully engage with. As a result, few IT graduates opt for technical postgraduate courses, most of them channel themselves to other career as backup plan to leave IT and not for making themselves good in deploying technical solutions, by the way there is a false claim that the technical career do not pay as much as other careers such as finance.
You may find these guys are on the stage of becoming experts with 3 or 4 years of experience in technical fields and now they are leaving for seems to be better jobs in other careers which creates constant gap for experienced experts. And the remained few once get promoted and become managers some of them do not want to get participated in developing technical solutions but only managing junior staffs who are not experienced and need their guidance in building their abilities
The two above are some of the reasons which describe the true reason as to why most of African countries technical departments keep on employing foreign professionals besides the increasing number technical graduates from their countries local universities.
African Information Technology sector comprised with a good number of vendors offering various solutions, These range from Microsoft, IBM, Huawei, ZTE, Cisco and many more. Solutions offered by these vendors requires good qualified people to plan, implement and operate the technology involved, Having someone specialized in dealing with a solution from one vendor or few gives a good opportunity to build him as an expert with the combination of special vendor training and experience.
Hence we have a number of Tanzanians although they are few as compared to those who are not in a position specializes in some technology solutions whom we can term them as experts, they spent themselves a good number of years on some specific solution or channel
Tanzania as a country still requires native experts, but there are notable challenges which resulted to failure or delay of getting them. Now the bad thing is these challenges form a cycle which resulted to long term absentees of professionals regardless of the good number of graduates in Technology.
The first noted challenge is the delivery nature of our trainings. Most university graduates and nowadays vocational graduates end up filled with only theoretical part of technical knowledge. A complete delivery of any technical education is supposed to involve practical but our training institutions does not emphasise on it due to mainly lack of fund in setting up complete labs with practice tools and sometimes just the nature of our syllabus not designed to accommodate some.
Now the issue becomes that most of the companies which may offer employment opportunities to these graduates strive to invest on latest and specialized technology solutions which not taught in practice at all during universities level therefore graduates become improper fits for the positions which requires someone with a certain expertize. Furthermore, they are even far back to be engaged to these solutions since they are not exposed to real industry solutions at all which studying as a result companies decided to develop only the already employed ones or employ someone from abroad to cover the gap. Since our training modality is not changing in early years and still there is a need for well equipped professionals with skills then this challenge will remain in place and the cycle continues
Now another notably challenge which causes the cycle for few native experts is the change of career. It is true that in order to be in a position of supporting a certain technology which offers a solution to a certain business users or have a certain business impact a technical guy must understand that business. For example an IT personnel who support bank users in using the core banking system must at least understands the concept behind credit and debit, A tech guy who plans, design and implement mobile money solution must have a good understanding of financial knowledge on reconciliation.
Although change of career can be a positive move but the issue becomes that these tech guys seems to fit so much in many other careers and sometimes turns to be easy to impress them to fully engage with. As a result, few IT graduates opt for technical postgraduate courses, most of them channel themselves to other career as backup plan to leave IT and not for making themselves good in deploying technical solutions, by the way there is a false claim that the technical career do not pay as much as other careers such as finance.
You may find these guys are on the stage of becoming experts with 3 or 4 years of experience in technical fields and now they are leaving for seems to be better jobs in other careers which creates constant gap for experienced experts. And the remained few once get promoted and become managers some of them do not want to get participated in developing technical solutions but only managing junior staffs who are not experienced and need their guidance in building their abilities
The two above are some of the reasons which describe the true reason as to why most of African countries technical departments keep on employing foreign professionals besides the increasing number technical graduates from their countries local universities.
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