Salesforce, the global leader in CRM announced its high-level talent strategy and skills programme to drive digital transformation and job creation in South Africa, at Salesforce Live Cape, the annual headlining event on Tuesday.
Ursula Fear, Senior Talent Programme Manager, shared Salesforce South Africa's talent strategy anchored on the five pillars of schools, universities and tertiary institutions, the partner ecosystem, customers and a country-wide digital skills initiative.
She also announced Salesforce's Accredited Training Partner and Workforce Development Partners, which sought to bring even more skills into the ecosystem.
The Salesforce ecosystem was expected to create 31,800 new jobs and generate $5.1 billion in new business revenue in South Africa by 2026.
Beyond developing skills, Fear emphasised the need to focus on the depth and breadth of the skills to ensure they were fit for purpose and aligned to a solid capability. “We need to come together and do things differently if we want to tackle the skills gap. It is not sustainable for businesses to import skills from abroad.”
As part of its commitment to skills, Salesforce would partner with Deloitte to start a skills boot camp in the first quarter of 2023. This will help people develop specialised skills.
Fear said they needed to come together and change the narrative around training and skills development in South Africa and this kind of collaboration is an important step in doing that.
Salesforce South Africa’s senior executives Zuko Mdwaba, Area Vice President and Country Leader, and Linda Saunders, Director of Solution Engineering, delivered the keynote address of the day. Titled “a new day for customer magic”, the address focused on the company’s latest innovations and releases, as well as their ongoing commitment to their climate action journey to NetZero.
The keynote emphasised Salesforce’s commitment to innovation at a time of tremendous transformation in the world. It’s a new day for customer magic, but it’s also a new day for business, underpinned by an alignment of values that drive innovation and change.
Mdwaba reminded the audience that Salesforce was a company driven by innovation. With three product releases every year, their priority is to support and empower businesses to be a platform for change, through trust, customer success, innovation, equality and sustainability. These five core values are the north star guiding the company’s success.
Meanwhile, the partnership between Nedbank and the Youth Employment Service (YES) was said to have created work opportunities for more than 7 000 South African youth over the past three years. One of the biggest winners as a result of this partnership has been the environment, with thousands of young people getting critical work experience in the conservation sector.
The YES programme saw corporate partners like Nedbank create and sponsor thousands of work experience opportunities each year in various high-impact sectors like conservation, healthcare, education, digital, early-childhood development and more.
Many of Nedbank’s 7 080 YES candidates were placed in the bank’s business units, and with one of 33 YES implementation partners (IPs) across South Africa. In line with Nedbank’s green economy programme, some candidates were placed with the bank’s conservation partners. Here, they gained critical skills in areas like land restoration, ecotourism, disaster management, education and even running food gardens.
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