My colleague and fellow Thought Leader contributor Vinny Lingham and I recently spent some time together discussing what we believe is the next wave of innovation on the web, post the social-networking drivers of Web 2.0. We believe that the world is poised for a dramatic increase in demand for niche, concise, on-demand skills training. This latent demand is most acute in the fundamental innovation driving knowledge areas of web technologies specifically, and the web environment in general.
In South Africa, we have a tremendously rich and valuable human resource base with ICT technology capabilities, but the skills sets are in most cases years, or a generation, behind that which is currently driving the growth of the web in developed economies. We found in our own web ventures that significant and relentless upskilling is required in order to upgrade and maintain the skills of local programmers, designers, web developers and online marketers to keep them in line with international standards. Unfortunately, this is difficult and costly, because we don’t have a good, reliable knowledge-transfer mechanism or resource in place in South Africa in order to keep up with international trends.
In South Africa, we’re particularly weak at maintaining web technology capabilities, because most local ICT employers still value highly three-year degree and diploma programmes despite the fact that the course material is being made obsolete faster than the rate at which it is being updated. On top of this is the fact that the teachers will find it extremely difficult to keep their own skills updated and relevant to the current web, especially when their time is almost entirely spent on academic pursuits.
The biggest weakness in the web technology knowledge-transfer mechanism in South Africa is mostly the educational institutions offering the longer technology qualifications. Those qualifications belong to a period in time where technology lifecycles were longer than three years, but as those cycles have shortened, so too has the efficacy of the qualifications. No doubt the qualifications are a wonderful base to work from when upskilling for the real web environment, but the students and the undergraduate schools are kidding themselves if they think those qualifications give the students internationally competitive ICT capabilities.
Let me explore my contention by referencing the most important web application technologies at this time: the Lamp stack, Ajax and Ruby on Rails:
Lamp stack: Linux: Work started on the kernel in 1991;
Apache: General availability release — April 2002;
MySQL: first production release January 2001; and
PHP: PHP 5 released in July 2004.Ajax: February 2005 ; and
Ruby on Rails: around in this form since July 2004.
If we make three simplifying assumptions:
Maximum age of people who could have formal training in current web technologies:
Most telling here is the maximum age of web developers/programmers that could have received formal training in the technologies that are currently creating the greatest competitive advantage in the web environment — PHP, Ajax and Ruby on Rails. Any developer/programmer older than 22 or 23 would generally have carried skills over from a previous generation of related technologies, taught themselves or been mentored by someone else that taught themselves. There are canyon-sized gaps in the learning that has taken place during this process in South Africa.
Self-learning and mentorship with partly trained individuals, though admirable, is a recipe for unconscious incompetence, aka the Dunning-Kruger Effect — we do not know what we do not know or, stated differently, “The individual neither understands or knows how to do something, nor recognises the deficit or has a desire to address it,” according to Wikipedia.org. Formal training lets us move along a competence-building continuum from conscious incompetence — we know what we do not know — to conscious incompetence and eventually to unconscious competence. Clearly our degree programmes can’t keep up — our technology training and education paradigm must shift from valuing three-year degrees and diploma programmes to appreciating the benefits of seminars, conferences, short courses and six- and 12-month diploma programmes.
By running regularly updated material in seminar, short-course and executive-suite training formats, my new project — KeyJam.net — hopes to educate and assist all levels of South African technology start-ups and corporates to contextualise the web for their businesses, particularly the underlying technologies, and to understand and act on the drivers for change that the web presents for their business.
KeyJam.net kicks off with a search-engine marketing seminar series titled Search Fundamentals presented by internationally recognised search-engine guru Vinny Lingham. These two-day seminars dealing with basic to intermediate-level search-engine marketing topics are essential for anyone wanting to understand why search engines are important, how to use them cost-effectively as a sales and marketing channel as a South African business, and why you can’t afford to ignore them. Paid-search workshops follow on from the seminars where seminar attendees can work through their real-world search-engine marketing campaigns with experts from Incubeta.com. The seminars will take place in Cape Town on October 9 and 10 and October 16 and 17 2007, and the paid-search workshops follow on October 11 and 18.
Based on a press release originally issued on Bizcommunity announcing the launch of KeyJam.net
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