Salesforce, global Leader in CRM, has announced a high-level talent strategy and skills program to support digital transformation and job development in South Africa.
At the annual Salesforce Live Cape event, senior talent programme manager Ursula Fear said Salesforce South Africa’s talent strategy focused on five pillars: schools, universities and tertiary institutions, the partner ecosystem, customers, and a country-wide digital skills initiative. She also unveiled Salesforce’s Accredited Training Partner and Workforce Development Partners, which seek to bring more skills into the ecosystem.
The Salesforce ecosystem is expected to create 31,800 new jobs and generate $5.1-billion in new business revenue in South Africa by 2026. Fear emphasised the need to focus on the depth and breadth of the skills to ensure they are 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 will partner with Deloitte to start a skills boot camp in the first quarter of 2023. This will help people develop specialised skills.
Fear said: “We need 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 senior executives Zuko Mdwaba, area vice president and country leader, and Linda Saunders, director of solution engineering, delivered the keynote addresses at the event. 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 is 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.
