Post-graduate programmes are key to filling the 45,000 vacant AI and data science jobs in SA. (Photo: iStock) 
“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.
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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).
A journey of reformation
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. “In South Africa, software developers, I think, earn the highest relative to living costs in the world, only behind America.”
Mind the multibillion-rand skills gap
Before we get to the solution, we have to look at the sheer scale of the problem. A sector analysis by Synesys suggests 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.
The 2024 JCSE-IITPSA ICT Skills Survey backs 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.”
Toolmakers, not mere users
This is where the finishing school concept gains clicks. The argument is that universities teach the grammar of computing – the deep theoretical proofs and algorithms – but fail to teach the dialects spoken in modern offices, like deploying code via GitHub or setting up an AWS cloud instance.
Professor Hussein Suleman, Dean of Science at UCT, agreed with the premise, if not the conclusion. He has famously argued that “Computer Science is not programming” and that universities are there to produce “tool builders”, not just “tool users”.
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The problem is, South African corporates are desperate for tool users. They need people who can ship code on day one, not just prove the mathematical efficiency of a sorting algorithm on a whiteboard.
Moola admits that early versions of HyperionDev got it wrong.
“We realised the courses were too hard,” he said, acknowledging that as a Cambridge and UCT grad, he had overestimated the baseline. “We had to keep not making them easier per se, but more accessible.”
The pivot has been a move toward what he calls “human-led code review”. It’s an attempt to mimic the mentorship you’d get from a senior dev in a real agile team.
“Mentorship is not a ‘nice to have’ in technical education, it’s a performance lever.”
What this means for you
If you are a student or graduate: The hard truth is that your degree is probably just the entry ticket, not the job guarantee. If your GitHub profile is empty, you are invisible to recruiters. Whether you pay for a bootcamp or grind through free resources, you need to prove you can build tools, not just pass exams. Treat your portfolio like your actual CV.
If you are a parent: You might need to adjust your financial planning. The three-year degree model is fading. If your child is studying Computer Science, prepare for the possibility of a finishing school year.
If you are hiring talent: Stop hunting for unicorns. That senior dev with five years of AI experience you are looking for is probably working for a US company earning dollars while sitting in Cape Town. If you want talent, you will have to manufacture it. The R124-billion cost to the economy is an aggregate of companies refusing to train the youth they have.
The business of bridging the gap
HyperionDev isn’t the only player trying to close this skills gap, and frankly, some of the competitors offer a model that makes a lot more sense for a cash-strapped South African student.
Take WeThinkCode, which operates on a tuition-free model sponsored by corporates, where entry is based purely on aptitude. Newly appointed CEO Ashmita Singh describes the company as “a critical bridge between talent and opportunity in an increasingly AI-driven economy.”
“Our focus is on shifting South Africa from being a consumer of technology to a creator of it by building strong coding and emerging AI capabilities that translate into real employment and economic mobility.”
Then there is Umuzi, which actually pays students a stipend to learn, treating the education process like a job simulation.
In contrast, HyperionDev is a premium product. Courses can cost anywhere from R25,000 to over R80,000. While they offer income-share agreements (where you pay back once you’re hired), the financial burden ultimately sits with the learner.
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But by white labelling their bootcamps for partner universities, they have effectively become the outsourced vocational wing of the ivory tower Moola was throwing stones at. It gives the university a revenue stream and the student a certificate that doesn’t look like it came from a fly-by-night internet college.
No simple solutions
With WeThinkCode raking in grants and signing partnerships with Google and Meta in recent months, it seems like Big Tech is all in on developing those crucial missing skills in this gateway to Africa market.
But is outsourcing the silver bullet? Also no. The virtual emigration trend, where 40% of our local developers are working remotely for foreign companies, suggests that even if we fix the supply side, retaining that talent is a whole other economic battle.
What Moola and the government have correctly identified is that the university degree is no longer the finish line. Singh says that the company “signed a letter of intent with the Department of Higher Education and Training to further expand impact on a national level by bringing together public, private and civil bodies to create a necessary ecosystem”.
The underutilisation of potential ICT talent in South Africa has an estimated lifetime opportunity cost of R11.5-trillion. In a market losing billions of rand to a skills vacuum, we probably need to pay the premium for the polish. DM