Millions Of Jobs To Be Gained

As the world turns to advanced technology – accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic – South Africa needs to sort out its digital policy issues or risk being left outside a new world order.

- Mariam Isa

The dramatic acceleration in digitisation triggered by Covid-19 lockdowns and social distancing will make millions of job losses across the world permanent unless the global workforce rapidly acquires the skills needed to tackle new technologies.

Technology giant Microsoft has warned that the transition is essential to drive recovery from the worst global recession in at least eight decades, which may leave a quarter of a billion people unemployed this year. The pandemic has shone a “harsh light” on what was already a widening global skills gap, it says.

“Crises have a way of accelerating trends already in motion, and the Covid-19 pandemic has proven no exception. Our data shows that two years’ worth of digital transformation have been concentrated into the past two months,” it said on 30 June. The final weeks of March alone saw as much broadband traffic as could be expected in a full year, it added.

Technologies powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are ushering in an era of automation and disruption, which is now widely described as the fourth industrial revolution (4IR), incorporating cloud computing, robotics, advanced wireless technologies and the Internet of Things.

But even in developed countries, skills to address the transition are in short supply, partly because of a drop-off in corporate training investments over the past two decades.

In South Africa the problem is acute, given the lack of emphasis placed on technology in both public and private higher learning institutions.