The job prospects of ICT graduates in internship programmes – A comparison between public sector and private sector internships

Abstract

The ICT skills paradox is a phenomenon in South Africa where there is industry demand for ICT skills, yet there remain many unemployed ICT graduates. The motivation for this study is to investigate the reason why this demand does not lead to the wholesale absorption of graduates, and how internship programmes remedy this paradox by bridging school and work for ICT graduates. The knowledge gap here lies in why graduates with the requisite skills, do not attain jobs after their graduate internship programmes, despite the demand for those skills in the industry. This paper argues that human capital theory and its application to graduate internship programmes is non-linear, because the investment of learning and upskilling in these programmes does not necessarily guarantee higher wages, and sometimes not even a job offer following the internship. This challenges the expectation of returns from the investment made into the graduates and thus the base assumptions of human capital theory. Secondarily, the paper also argues that even if the assumptions of human capital theory are true, the investment made into the graduates in the form of learning can be impeded by the structure of the programme and the resources that are made available. The quality of the learning thus challenges social learning theory and its assumptions about the impact of learning in and through the work environment. The research design of this paper is qualitative, and it investigates ten case studies of managers from the public and private sectors. The data was analysed by coding the responses of the managers about how interns learn in the workplace, what resources are available for learning in and through work, and finally whether interns are retained and how managers determine which interns ought to be retained. The codes were then measured against the assumptions of human capital theory – specifically if there is linearity in the investment into human capital (learning) and returns (in this study, the attainment of a job after the programme). The study finds that two factors influence the employment prospects of ICT graduates in the labour market. The first influencing factor is the capacity of their programme host organisation to retain their interns as full-time staff, which is informed by government policy and directives, as well as the organisation’s budget for wages. The second influencing factor, where managers have the capacity to retain interns, is the set of skills that the managers screen for, which, in this study, are unanimously soft skills such as problem-solving and “self-motivation”. This study concludes by contemplating the non- linearity of human capital theory as it applies to the programmes that are studied, as well as the limits to social learning theory as it applies to learning in and through work in graduate internship programmes. Following this is a discussion of the remaining gaps in the knowledge and how they could be studied further.