advertisement
Facebook
X
LinkedIn
WhatsApp
Reddit

#FeesMustFall, but #SkilllsMustRise too

We are currently experiencing one of the greatest revolutions of our times, students standing up on their belief to say: #FeesMustFall. The support behind the Free Education movement has been tremendous. Education is important because we all need to get the adequate skills to enable greatness in our lives.

Through the #FeesMustFall movement, a lot of questions arose such as: “How much does it cost to produce a graduate in South Africa?”, “Are South African universities spending too much to produce a single graduate?” and a lot more.

In ICT particularly, South Africa is ranked number 75 in the global Network Readiness Index of the Global Information Technology Report by the World Economic Forum. [You can watch a summary of it below]

Skills capacity remains a challenge in the country, employers [and] recruiters are having a tough time in bringing the right skills into the job market. Reality is, a large number of graduates end up not using their acquired skills.

More often than not, graduates would land jobs as office assistants, shop keepers, clerks, in construction sites and others. [This creates] two more questions: “are these graduates not skilled enough?” and “should the fees increase to get the best skills?” Well, chances of employment also depends on which institution you went to.

Geekulcha believes that it’s all about what you can do. Here’s what the Geekulcha community is interested in.

SkillsMustRise

Let’s build the skills capacity

As a platform for ICT students, Geekulcha champions the following aspects of skills transformation: Realization, Acquirement, Development, Redistribution and Utilization. We got your back Jack! These are the ways Geekulcha will help you develop your skills this year.

  • Hackathons (SKAHack, GKHack16, RHoK Pretoria, NCDevHack and others)
  • Maker Culture drive: Electronics, IoT, Big Data, sensor tech, open source, etc.
  • Open Data: Data analysis, processing and visualizations through a collaboration with Code4SA
  • Campus Invasion: We will be coming to your campus very soon to train and expose your skills to the corporate world.
  • Future GeekStars: We need to start growing skills from the early age. Let’s teach high scholars about Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

Use everything at your disposal, there are a lot of resources out there, use them to learn and grow your skills.

The Fees Must Fall but let’s make them Skills Rise in 2016, the journey starts now and it’s all up to you.

Tiyani Nghonyama is the COO of Geekulcha, an organisation dedicated to improving access to tech careers for South African students and this story originally appeared on Geekulcha.com

 

advertisement

About Author

advertisement

Related News

advertisement