HyperionDev founding CEO Riaz Moola believes he has the solution to one of the biggest skills crises in the country, but of course he would – his company stands to make billions if he is right. “South Africa doesn’t have an ambition problem when it comes to tech talent, it has an outcomes problem.” That is how HyperionDev founding CEO Riaz Moola, the coding bootcamp specialist you probably heard about in a year-end marketing campaign that ran across Primedia radio stations, opened a conversation about the AI skills crisis in Mzansi. He then went on to frame the company operations as a “finishing school” for Computer Science graduates, because our tertiary institutions aren’t teaching work-ready skills.
To be fair to Moola, his suggestions that the likes of UCT, Wits and Stellenbosch University (that have been churning out world-class minds for decades) are obsolete, and that the fix is a privately run, venture-backed bootcamp, is at least accompanied by partnerships with the universities (Maties, currently). HyperionDev (which trades as CoGrammar) hasn’t always helped its own case. Search the dev boards on Reddit and the company’s history reveals a trail of operational controversies, most notably some conflict with the UK Department for Education regarding funding claims, and persistent user reviews describing earlier iterations of its courseware as a “dropbox full of PDFs” rather than a high-tech learning experience.
The experiences seen on the internet fly in the face of the ed-tech saviour narrative. But as Moola unpacked the mechanics of the “finishing school” model, he sounded like a man who had learned some hard lessons. “We live in a country that has the highest inequality in the world and yet you have a subject [Computer Science] that can unlock the highest earnings,” he said.
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“In South Africa, software developers, I think, earn the highest relative to living costs in the world, only behind America.” Before we get to the solution, we have to look at the sheer scale of the problem. Asector analysis by Synesyssuggests that the AI skills shortage alone could cost the South African economy up to R124-billion by 2027. Perplexingly, local youth unemployment sits at over 60%, but there are 45,000 unfilled positions in AI and data science right now.
The2024 JCSE-IITPSA ICT Skills Surveybacks this up, calling it a “chronic skills shortage” that is forcing local companies to outsource jobs to international markets; exporting capital when we should be importing wages. Moola argues that this gap exists because universities and the industry are speaking different languages. “The pathway to it is very convoluted and complex if you’re going to do a three-year or four-year computer science degree,” he says. “And it totally fails to teach the skills to actually get a job as a junior developer or data scientist.”
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