As Mike Stopforth mentioned yesterday, we spent some quality time together yesterday discussing the future of the Design Indaba and the state of the social media industry in South Africa and the consequences of the flurry of corporate hires over the past few months.  I feel quite strongly that there needs to be a strong entrepeneurial base for social media to take off in South Africa and there is a general sense that this might be being eroded.

We are headed for a major crisis, if we’re not already in one.

The education system in South Africa is hopelessly myopic when it comes to equipping students with direction as far as their careers are concerned and this needs to change.  I have not met anyone in the Web and social media industry who has not lamented the lack of skills in the country.  This is even more visible in areas like mobile application development skills and I just can’t understand why people would spend so much time educating students in one area that has a glut of skills when there are other massive gaps.  I’ll give you a simple example – you can study information systems or something similar, graduate and struggle to find a good job.  The same person could learn a little Java programming and start earning 40k a month from their first day or start a business at the age of 22 and have more work than they can accomodate from day 1.  I just don’t get that.

As Mike mentioned on his blog, we’re thinking about setting up a co-ordinated roadshow to universities to raise awareness and provide some direction for students in technical, media, marketing, journalism and advertising courses.  So far several people have indicated that they are interested in getting involved, so I suggest we create groups in each region and tackle the local institutions locally and see how that goes.

My disclaimer: I didn’t write this post as quickly as Mike because my nerves were shot following a high-speed race through Cape Town only to miss my flight, get transferred to the next one, have that delayed by a further 2 hours because, wait for it, improperly sealed human remains contaminated one of the SAA flights yesterday.