Vendor Skills

Vendor-specific in demand certified skills

Microsoft continues to dominate the technology landscape given its long standing market share in the country and its Azure data centres in Cape Town and Johannesburg. However, Amazon and Google are closing the gap for the most in demand critical vendor certified skills in South Africa. In fact, Amazon Web Services launched a data centre in Cape Town in an effort to captilise on the burgeoning cloud services market in the country, and across the continent. The retail, e-commerce and technology multinational has added 3,000 new virtual customer service jobs to bring its total permanent workforce in South Africa to 7,000 people. Globally, Google Certified Cloud Professionals, AWS Certified Practitioners and Microsoft Certified Professionals are ranked in the 15 most in demand certifications for 2020 by both CIO and PCMag. Generally, these services include integrated solutions that are ubiquitous and yet based on proprietary systems/platforms that require professional skill sets. Ease of access, as-a-service and networking appears to be the dominant criteria for these technology environments with specialist technology (SAP, Sage, Salesforce) occupying more niche areas. As such, expertise and skills in these vendor-specific technologies, particularly in security and data management, are highly sought after.

Top vendor certifications most in demand

The top 10 vendor certifications required by respondents to the survey include  Microsoft Azure Data Scientists and Developers which reflects the tech giant’s data centre dominance within the South African digital  and ICT landscape. Google Cloud Developers are also in high demand as are AWS Cloud Practiioners to service Amazon’s growing market share in the as-a-service and cloud technology space.

 

Other vendor certifications in demand include Cisco Certified Network Professionals, IBM Cloud Specialists and Oracle Certified Associates.