Armed with talent, determination, and a deep fascination for the field, participants such as Tebatso Moses Munyai and Leutsoa Moteka are using these initiatives to earn a place in SA’s nascent fourth industrial revolution.
Tebatso Munyai’s philosophy is to “take chances we’re given and let no opportunity pass you by”. It’s one that has served him well; as a successful applicant on Huawei’s Seeds for the Future programme, he was one of 40 South African students selected from local universities between 2016 and 2019 to travel to China. There, he spent two weeks training in up-to-date technologies at Huawei’s most advanced laboratories.
We travelled to major cities such as Hong Kong, Beijing and Shenzhen, where we learned about Chinese culture, ICT technologies, and how China has embraced and harnessed ICT technologies to build a connected world, starting with mobile payments, connected bicycles, smart transport systems, safe-city features among others – all brought together in harmony through the Internet of Things.
Tebatso Munyai
Tebatso is one of many youths to have benefitted from Huawei’s programmes towards building South Africa’s ICT industry. These initiatives set out to boost the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR) locally, and meet President Ramaphosa’s call to “create jobs for the unemployed of today while preparing workers for the jobs of tomorrow.”
Both Tebatso’s character and enthusiasm hugely impressed the Huawei team, who are on the lookout for talent with the right combination of dedication and passion to thrive in the challenging field of ICT. They seek to foster such individuals as they grow to become the high calibre professionals of the future, primed to drive digital transformation and fast-track South Africa’s place in a hugely competitive industry.
This is also the aim of the Huawei ICT Academy, which offers industry recognised certification to give students and advantage when they enter the workplace.
In 2015, Huawei established their first South African academy in partnership with Tshwane University of Technology (TUT), later adding the University of Johannesburg (UJ) and the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) to an ICT talent ecosystem that includes more than 1,000 universities and colleges worldwide.
Huawei’s Graduate Programme recruits around 20 – 30 graduates each year from diverse fields. During the programme, the graduates get to experience corporate life and undergo intensive training with the support of experienced mentors, thus making them more attractive to potential employers down the line. In addition, Huawei runs an internship programme in which one hundred students are recruited annually in a project with the MICT SETA, after 8-12 months of training the students are recruited by Huawei and its channel partners.
Leutsoa Moteka, a student from Wits University, launched his career with the HCNA Certificate. Like Tebatso, Leutsoa is driven by a deep and abiding interest in the field. As a child, he says he was “always fascinated by computers and communications devices… I always wondered, ‘How does the internet work?’”. As such, his certification has enabled him to realise a long-held ambition, “to configure internet protocols and understand how the network and the internet works.”
