redAcademy MD Jessica Hawkey is driven by a passion to drive positive impact in SA
Honoured as Top Tech Innovator at the 2024 Wired4Women awards, redAcademy founder and MD Jessica Hawkey is driven by an unrelenting drive to work towards closing the skills gap in South Africa. In doing this, she hopes to play a part in shifting the scales in the highly imbalanced ecosystem of off-shoring work, essentially taking billions of rands out of the economy so desperately in need of growth impetus. Change requires a shift in thinking, but she says this shift is already occurring.
Hawkey founded redAcademy to create a skilled pipeline of IT talent for businesses, trained specifically for unique needs within businesses. The young people are work ready in a year because of a carefully curated programme of theory and live, on-the-job training in the partner businesses. She explains that the model is about more than “just filling a role” but also about real, sustainable impact.
“Yes, businesses get the skills they need instead of skills development being a box-ticking exercise, but they also enjoy genuine cost savings through a vast reduction in the time it ordinarily takes to get new hires up to par on their roles, the company culture and the technology stack within the business. The whole idea is about boosting productivity and enabling businesses to deliver on their mandates with no disruption and unfilled junior roles.”
“Then, the impact on the graduates cannot be overstated. The model drives intergenerational impact because it enables young people from a diversity of backgrounds to uplift their families and because they enter an in-demand career, they have the ability to create a different economic future for their children with more opportunities. This is what wakes me up in the morning because this is addressing South Africa’s painful paradox: Thousands of unfilled jobs in the context of the highest youth unemployment rate in the world.” explains Hawkey.
Being a woman in a male-dominated technology industry, Hawkey uses her platform to inspire other young women to follow suit. “I take my position seriously, and I hope to be a voice that gives more women the belief that they, too, can make an impact. Whenever redAcademy’s team speaks at events such as school activations, our youth bring a full representation of successful candidates in our academy, both young women and men, to ignite a passion for technology. The learners meet women and men from the same backgrounds as them who are now successfully employed as software engineers – that’s inspiring.”
Hawkey didn’t start her career in technology, having developed her leadership style in the world of finance. This is where she was first exposed to the off-shoring imbalance which she is passionate to help address.
“I spent a decade in the financial industry where I worked overseas and was immersed in other cultures. I came back to South Africa more determined than ever before to drive change. It was in my time as GM of operations in a finance business in South Africa where I began to understand the off-shoring imbalance, complete with its unsustainable costs – both to businesses and the country.
“Off-shoring excludes our own unemployed youth, reduces our tax base, and reduces the future customer base. It won’t happen overnight, but by methodically addressing the skills gap and bringing more of our youth into the formal economy, the R8,5bn currently offshored can be reduced, with the requisite economic knock-on effect for households that will have employed people, with good salaries, in them – possibly for the first time,” explains Hawkey.
She says that she has found herself needing to educate the business community on her new model for technology skills acquisition. “Businesses are used to doing things a certain way, but there is just not enough work ready skills, even amongst university graduates who have not yet been exposed to the professional world. So it requires a strong shift in thinking. This shift is happening and awareness is growing, especially as businesses learn that we have secured 100% full-time employment for our candidates when they leave the academy – this is validation for them of the viability of alternative talent-sourcing models.”
When asked why she chose to build an IT skills academy, Hawkey explains that technology is pervasive. “Software is involved in everything we do both personally and in business. This has driven demand well out of reach of supply. The world is digitising at an unbelievable rate and so the demand will just keep growing. No doubt this is what is forcing businesses to look offshore. And so, by demonstrating the viability of producing work-ready software developers much quicker than traditional channels, we aim to manage costs for businesses and keep rands in South Africa as opposed to offshore.”
Hawkey is under no illusions that to make a meaningful dent in the skills gap, the model needs scale. “I plan to expand redAcademy into a minimum of five new locations annually. This will allow us to reach more youth, creating sustainable and scalable careers, while building momentum for South African businesses to host a local tech workforce in software development and data science at a globally competitive price.
“South Africa has successfully showcased what is possible in the contact centre industry, leveraging our time zone alignment to Europe. This model can also be employed in the highly complex field of technology and development.”
