OpenText has achieved a Level 1 Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) rating for the fifth consecutive year.
“For us, B-BBEE is about much more than compliance. We believe that every member of corporate South Africa plays a crucial role in transforming our society, create meaningful employment opportunities and provide a much-needed skills boost to our country’s talent pool,” says Tsepa Ramoriting, vice-president: sales at OpenText Africa.
In 2018, OpenText partnered with the Maharishi Invincibility Institute (MII), South Africa’s leading non-profit private education and training provider. Through MII, close to 20,000 graduates have launched careers in finance, banking, technology, advertising, management consulting and more. The Institute’s education approach has enabled it to maintain a 90% job placement rate for over a decade.
According to the 2022 JCSE-IITPSA ICT Skills Survey – conducted by Wits University’s Johannesburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE) in partnership with the Institute of Information Technology Professionals South Africa (IITPSA), the number of South African employers reporting they are recruiting ICT skills overseas has increased dramatically in the past year – up from 38% to over 50%.
“With a massive youth unemployment rate and a growing scarcity of ICT skills, we simply cannot sit back and watch this tragic picture unfold,” says Ramoriting.
To help address these challenges and find solutions that will create enduring employment opportunities, OpenText – in partnership with MII – launched the Sediba Digital Academy in 2022. The Sediba Digital Academy has been designed to address the critical skills shortages in South Africa. Through a carefully crafted and considered curriculum, OpenText aims to transform lives through education, feed the local talent pool with critically needed skills and empower youth to become employable.
With the second intake of graduates planned for 2023, OpenText is focused on expanding the Sediba Digital Academy to further advance the skills development and employment agenda. The Sediba Digital Academy is actively supported by the OpenText executive leadership team and leverages best practices from other similar global OpenText skills development programmes.
Ramoriting believes that this achievement is a testament to OpenText’s long-term commitment to South Africa and growing its economy. “The Sediba Digital Academy is a humble, yet vital contribution to developing our country’s future digital leaders,” he says.