The competency illusion: Why Africa’s tech ecosystem is firing top engineers

Across Africa’s tech ecosystem, technical proficiency alone is no longer enough to guarantee career progression or long-term value. Engineers may excel at writing clean code and passing technical assessments, yet they often struggle to translate their output into organisational impact.

The traditional engineering assessment has become a flawed metric. For years, tech companies have assumed that raw programming capability directly equates to commercial value. This assumption is proving costly. When an engineer operates in an isolated technical bubble—unable to communicate progress or align tasks with broader business objectives—the whole organisation suffers. Requiring an intermediary to translate every piece of code for non-technical stakeholders introduces systemic inefficiency across agile teams.

Technical skill is now merely the entry price to the workforce. The factors that determine long-term retention and leadership potential lie entirely beyond syntax and logic. Companies are quickly realising that technical brilliance without business literacy is a liability.

Data from the World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report 2025 highlights this massive shift in employer priorities. Analytical thinking and resilience now rank at the top of core workforce skills. Programming, by contrast, finished near the bottom, ranking 23rd out of 26 competencies. Meanwhile, demand for leadership and social influence saw the steepest global surge, jumping 22 percentage points within two years.

This global realignment reflects real-world dynamics across North Africa. In Egypt, a recent survey of leading businesses found that 78 per cent of enterprise firms struggle to find talent with adequate operational capabilities, such as creative thinking and problem-solving, essential “human” skills rather than purely technical ones. Similarly, data from Morocco’s High Commission for Planning revealed that although the economy created 282,000 new positions between early 2024 and 2025, structural mismatches left 37.7 per cent of university graduates unemployed. The jobs are being created, but young professionals lack the holistic skills needed to secure them.

The AI Accelerator: Moving from syntax to strategy

Artificial intelligence accelerates this transformation with each passing quarter. As generative tools take over initial code generation and routine builds, automated systems are rapidly absorbing the execution phase of software development. But rather than diminishing human importance, this shift elevates uniquely human capabilities to a decisive position.

With automation handling standard execution, software engineers must step into strategic roles. Professionals need to determine which problems are worth solving, navigate complex organisational environments, secure stakeholder buy-in, and lead teams through ongoing changes. The modern technology stack is increasingly driven by strategic direction rather than raw syntax.

Underpinning this shift is the rapidly shrinking lifespan of hard skills. Today, a specific programming language or framework can become outdated faster than at any point in history, frequently replaced before a new engineer completes their probation.

As a result, initial technical knowledge depreciates quickly. The true measure of an engineer’s long-term value lies in their ability to proactively learn and master new skills independently. This drive for continuous self-directed learning must be an intrinsic habit rather than a reaction to management demands, a quality that standardised curricula and traditional coding tests simply cannot measure.

Overhauling tech talent development

Bridging this gap requires a structural overhaul of how we develop tech talent. Educational frameworks must move away from isolated screen time and theoretical assessments toward models grounded in real-world practice and collaborative learning. At ALX Africa, for example, we implement a framework based on 10% traditional learning, 20% peer interaction, and 70% practical application to directly address this skill gap.

True competency is demonstrated through working deliverables, not multiple-choice exams. Graduation should depend on building functional systems and defending those solutions before peers. This interactive model forces learners to practice essential communication skills by requiring them to clearly explain their logic and justify their architectural choices under peer review.

The success of this practical approach is evident in career outcomes: over 60% of ALX graduates secure job placement within six months, rising to over 90% within a year. Hiring partners consistently return to request more candidates trained through frameworks that emphasise this blended skill set.

A call to action

Fixing the talent pipeline requires immediate operational changes from engineering leaders and recruiters. Hiring processes must evaluate practical execution rather than relying solely on formal credentials. Interviews should challenge candidates to explain the reasoning behind past projects, including honest evaluations of both successful decisions and flawed architectural choices.

Communication skills must carry the same weight as technical expertise. Just as an organisation would reject a candidate for failing a coding assessment, it should reject those who cannot articulate their work to key business stakeholders. Furthermore, evaluating what a candidate has learned independently over the past year provides the clearest signal of their growth potential over the next five years.

The shelf life of specific technical skills will only continue to shrink, but a professional’s mastery of continuous learning remains permanently valuable. Africa’s tech ecosystem must shift from hiring for static technical knowledge to investing in adaptable, strategic talent.

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Mohamed Moniem is General Manager for North Africa at ALX, responsible for the region’s strategy, operations, and growth. He was a petroleum engineer before co-founding pyramidBITS, a digital transformation company. He has built the ALX Egypt business since 2022, growing it to deliver more than 29,000 graduates in three years.