• Much has been made of the lack of digital skills in the country, and the need for the public and private sector to address this.
• There is promise locally, however, as South Africa recently won 15 medals at the 2022 BRICS Future Skills Challenge.
• This is quite the accomplishment as SA won nearly as many medals as India, which dwarves South Africa in terms of its population.

In recent years we have lamented the lack of digital skills in the country, something that has needed the input from the public and private sectors in order to address. While there is still a dearth of critical digital skills locally, the recent BRICS Future Skills Challenge shows just how much promise there is in South Africa despite some of the woes being faced.

This as the country took home 15 medals at the event, illustrating that our own young professionals and students are comparable to those of top candidates from Brazil, Russia, India, and China.

“SA’s team of competitors comprised 240 young professionals and students aged between 16 and 35 who are skilled in robotic process automation, mobile app development, data science and digital factory skills amongst others,” explained organisers in a press release sent to Hypertext.

“South Africa won about 10% of medals awarded in the categories in which we competed. This is remarkable for a country with a total population of around 60 million. The SA team walked away with almost the same number of medals as India, which has a population of 1.4 billion. SA won 15 medals across the 12 challenge areas in which we competed, 10 medals of which were top three placements,” noted Joanne Brink, project manager at BRICS Future Skills Challenge.

With SA set to host next year’s edition of the event, there is much to look forward to, as well as prepare for. “We are excited for South Africa to host the BRICS Skills Challenge in 2023 and we got valuable learnings from participating,” added Brink.

The SA team won bronze and silver awards in several categories including, internet marketing, mobile app development, digital twin, life cycle management, Internet of Things (IoT), aircraft maintenance, artificial intelligence, data science, and cyber security.

“Competing against BRICS colleagues has provided a useful benchmark and boosted my abilities in business analysis. It has also helped to interpret findings using appropriate visuals,” pointed out data science silver winner, Adebowale Tosin.

As such, we have an idea of where South Africa ranks among its BRICS counterparts in terms of the quality of our digital skills, and while the 15 medal haul is impressive, there is clearly the desire and scope to do more.

[Image – Photo by Shaun Meintjes on Unsplash]