Matiang'i raises alarm on high-end ICT skills gap

Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore, left, and Dr Fred Matiangi Cabinet Secretary ICT unveil plague at the official launch of @iLabAfrica and @iBizAfrica at the Strathmore University Auditorium, Phase 2, Nairobi, Kenya on Thursday, June 19th 2014. Photo/Jonah Onyango.

Nairobi; Kenya: The Government has raised alarm at the lack of adequate specialised skills in the ICT sector at a time when the industry is undergoing aggressive expansion.

According to Information and Communication Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang'i, multi-billion ICT projects in both the national and county governments are in jeopardy over inadequate personnel to execute them.

"The demand for IT skills in the government is increasing and as we are looking to digitise databases and automate processes in government, getting high-end personnel is our biggest challenge," he said.

A study conducted to evaluate the skills availability in the ICT industry found out that four out of 10 employers find it difficult to fill positions of software developers and application systems analysts.

This has forced companies, particularly large corporations, to outsource high-end IT services to expatriates with up to one in three employers filling IT vacancies with foreign nationals. The situation is made worse by the fact that the few skilled personnel who are in great demand keep leaving the public sector for the private sector, which pays more, forcing the government to increase its wage bill to match private sector salaries.

"There is a lot of mobility in the IT sector and people keep moving about and we are updating our personnel records but the fact is we still need more capacity especially for the counties," states Dr Matiang'i.

Matiang'i says students who graduate from the country's institutions of higher learning are not adequately equipped with the requisite business skills to complement the technological knowledge they are trained on. "We churn out thousands of graduates into the market, but they face a challenge in getting jobs as they do not match the skill sets the employers are looking for," he said.

However, a study by the University of Nairobi found out that employers in the local IT sector do not adequately differentiate the skills they need, leading to the skills gap.