Mpumelelo Pinky Mbhamali. (Photo: supplied) 
After Mpumelelo Pinky Mbhamali finished high school, she went straight into the world of work. Armed with enthusiasm and a willingness to learn, she gave manicures and pedicures to patients at Netcare hospitals.
“I identified places where our business could improve by using technology, so first I set up a WhatsApp group and soon I started coordinating the diary appointments in real-time online,” she said.
Mbhamali realised technology was her passion and took a course at the AWS (Amazon Web Services) Skills Center in Cape Town. She’s now a certified AWS cloud practitioner, having completed what is usually a six-month course in two months.
She has launched a company, CloudBboost, offering small businesses an instant QR code generator.
“I’ve just built a website and chatbot for my former employer, Pamper Me,” she said. Sharing her certification journey on TikTok helped her grow her followers on the social media platform by 300% within a month.
Hers is just one of thousands of AWS success stories. The skills centre in Cape Town is the third of its kind in the world; the other two are in Seattle and Arlington in the US. Each centre offers cloud training and career exploration activities that are free of charge and open to the public.
Visitors can learn how cloud technology is powering everything from weather predictions to robotics, through gamified, interactive experiences.
A 2023 World Economic Forum Future of Jobs report showed that:
- Organisations identify skills gaps (60% of respondents) and an inability to attract talent (53%) as the key barriers preventing industry transformation.
- Sixty percent of workers will require training before 2027, but only half have access to adequate training opportunities today.
- More than 75% of organisations plan to adopt technologies such as big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence in the next five years — driving a surge in demand for individuals with these skills and creating approximately 2.6 million new jobs by 2027.
Speaking at the AWS Summit in Sandton last week, Chris Erasmus, the AWS country manager for South Africa, said South Africa was a strategic growth area for the group.
“We recognise that one of the biggest blocks of technology adoption is skills. In 2020, we announced we wanted to invest to train 29 million people (globally) with free digital skills by 2025. Earlier this year, we surpassed that goal, having already trained 31 million people,” he said.
Erasmus said more than 20,000 people had been trained at the Cape Town skills centre, while more than 300,000 had received training across sub-Saharan Africa. DM