The channel's skills gap is not a training problem

Andrew Harris, chief sales and marketing officer, DCC Technologies. (Image: DCC Technologies)

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A reseller with a dozen staff wins a deal that needs a cloud security architect. Not a certified engineer, an architect: someone who can sit in front of a client’s risk committee, design the environment, and defend those decisions when something breaks. 

The reseller has two options. Employ one, at a salary that will absorb a serious share of the year’s profit and be bid up again inside 18 months. Or hand the design work to somebody else and keep the hardware.

Most take the second option. The industry then files what happened under skills shortage.

That label is doing a lot of work. The channel’s skills gap is an arithmetic problem before it is an educational one, and we keep answering it with a training budget.

The training response is everywhere: vendor certification programmes, accreditation tiers, partner academies and subsidised courses. All useful. But training builds knowledge; it does not create the specialist capacity a reseller needs when a complex deal lands. Specialist capability cannot be bought in fractions. There is no such thing as a third of a security architect, and certification does not put a second specialist in the room when the first is on leave during a cutover.

The recruitment data points the same way. In the IITPSA ICT Skills Survey, 47% of South African employers ranked professional experience as the most important attribute when hiring, against 32% who put a graduate qualification first. Employers are prioritising people who have done the work.

The problem is that reseller portfolios keep widening. The same business is now expected to hold a defensible position across cloud migration, identity, data protection, cyber security and increasingly AI. Each is a specialism in its own right. Local shortages are most acute in exactly those areas, with cloud engineering, cyber security and AI at the top of the list. No mid-market reseller can carry that depth across every part of its portfolio.

Which leaves the question of who can. Vendors build real depth, but around their own products, while customer problems are rarely single-vendor. Large integrators build it and then compete with the resellers who need it. Independent specialists exist, and their pricing reflects their scarcity.

Distribution is the only layer of the channel where the numbers work. A distributor employing a solution architect spreads that cost across its reseller base, turning a salary no single partner can justify into capability every partner can reach. That is not a value-added service sitting alongside the product business. It is the only structure in this channel that makes specialist depth affordable at the point where it is needed.

For distributors, the implication is uncomfortable. It means paying people whose contribution shows up in deals that resellers win rather than lines on an invoice. Read quarterly, that is cost. Read across a partner base over several years, it is competitive position.

The education pipeline will not close this gap on a timescale that matters commercially. The answer is to carry the cost of expertise where it can be spread. In this channel, that means distribution.

References

1. IITPSA ICT Skills Survey, reported by ITWeb: https://www.itweb.co.za/article/experience-tops-wish-list-as-sa-ict-skills-shortage-persists/PmxVE7KEV2VqQY85

2. SA's digital future at risk amid growing cloud, AI skills gap, ITWeb, 3 March 2026: https://www.itweb.co.za/article/sas-digital-future-at-risk-amid-growing-cloud-ai-skills-gap/KPNG878New9q4mwD