Bilal Kathrada

Introducing Bilal Kathrada

Bilal Kathrada is the CEO and founder of IT Varsity, an education business focused on transforming South African computer science graduates into fully employable junior developers. As well as speaking at conferences and advising businesses about strategic digital transformation, Bilal writes a weekly tech opinion column for The Cape Argus, a South African newspaper. Passionate about transforming the tech landscape of the future, he has also launched CompuKids, an educational program designed to provide a 21st century computer science curriculum in primary and secondary schools. Find Bilal on Twitter: @BilalKathrada.

Geertjan Wielenga: Can you briefly talk about your background?

Bilal Kathrada: I'm a software engineer by profession, I'm a certified Java programmer, and I've done some Java development in the past. Now I run an online institute that trains people to become developers.

Geertjan Wielenga: In many ways, I think that you're a developer advocate. You work with developers, you give them skills, and you update them on the latest tech developments. You fit into a long history of people around the world doing this work in the tech space. Would you agree?

Encouraging young people

Bilal Kathrada: Absolutely. Besides running my institute, I also travel to schools around South Africa to talk to children about careers in development. In South Africa, the level of computer science education in schools is pathetic. I try to get young people clued up to give them advantages in the future.

I run developer workshops for young people and speak to universities and businesses to encourage people to get into tech careers. I also write for four major national newspapers about tech and run a weekly podcast called TechWatch, where we speak about getting into tech and developer careers.

Geertjan Wielenga: Could you say more about the South African context behind your work?

Bilal Kathrada: The South African context is a very problematic one. Since apartheid fell away, the expectations that people had have not been fulfilled. There's a lot of corruption, an economic crisis, and massive youth unemployment. I think the latest reports said that we have 45% youth unemployment. That's the first issue.

What further compounds the problem in South Africa is that we're likely the most developed nation in Africa and potentially we could be the tech gateway to the whole of Africa. Unfortunately, we've fallen way behind on this simply because we haven't prepared our youth for entrepreneurship and innovation in the space of tech and development. We've taken a back seat compared to other countries like Kenya.

Roles are being outsourced to international workers because there aren't many South Africans who are skilled enough to do development work. That's compounding the problems we already have. The South African context is pretty much defined by this.

"South African youth are getting the lowest possible quality of education that you can imagine, especially when it comes to tech."

—Bilal Kathrada

The reason that this is all happening is that our universities haven't kept pace with what's going on in the world. South African youth are getting the lowest possible quality of education that you can imagine, especially when it comes to tech. Thousands of graduates are emerging every year from our universities and the one word to describe them is "unemployable." They're unemployable because they just don't have the skills that they need. They have some theory, which is usually outdated, but no skills to go into development work.

Geertjan Wielenga: What specific skills do they need?

Bilal Kathrada: They need three levels of skills. Level one is knowing the very basic theory around development. Most universities offer a very theoretical qualification as far as IT goes, but they stop at this layer.

The second layer is marketable skills. There's a vast difference between learning to code in Java and learning to create an application in Java, for example.

Java coding will consist of the fundamentals of the language, which is great, but over and above that you need additional knowledge, such as knowing how databases operate and how your application will connect to the database.

If you go to a typical South African university, there are HTML courses with a little bit of JavaScript thrown in and some Java here and there, but it's a very basic level of education.

The third layer that's needed is soft skills, such as entrepreneurship, personal branding, digital marketing, and all of the skills that help you to accelerate yourself from where you are to where you want to be in life.

Geertjan Wielenga: There's a pressing need for new developers throughout South Africa. Is that correct?

Bilal Kathrada: There are plenty of jobs, yes. You've got your fair share of companies that have adopted the Java ecosystem and others that have adopted .NET or Python. You're not confined to any one specific tech. The role I'm trying to play in South Africa is helping people to fulfill all three layers of the pyramid. That's why I left my development job.

I felt the same pain as young people do now when I left university and went to get my first job. I approached a couple of non-profit organizations that needed systems to be developed and I did that at no cost. That got me an interview and then I had to prove myself to get the job. I discovered that there was a lot that I didn't know. Seeing this skills gap, I decided to design a curriculum to teach people these skills. I now have students from countries including Nigeria, Haiti, and Kenya.

Geertjan Wielenga: What are the subjects that you teach?

Bilal Kathrada: The focus is on full-stack development, so we started using Java, HTML, CSS, MySQL, and full-stack applications, then we introduced PHP because there's a lot of demand for it in South Africa. Recently, we've noticed that there is demand for .NET too; there seems to be an upswing in terms of companies looking for .NET developers.

Students are free to choose what stream they want to get into and we advise them accordingly. We've noticed that there are many learners who are enthusiastic about getting into IT, but they're not quite hardcore developer material. Rather than turn them away or demotivate them, we offer them the option of going into web design. Our bright sparks continue with mobile and full-stack development. We place a very strong emphasis on good coding practices, such as code documentation, testing, and writing clean code.

Geertjan Wielenga: Do you see a place for open source in your curriculum? These projects are on GitHub and even if you're not very technical, you can get involved in all kinds of other ways: finding issues and bugs, trying out the software, and writing documentation.

Bilal Kathrada: Yes, we constantly encourage our learners to get involved. Open-source projects are an excellent way of expanding your knowledge of development.

Geertjan Wielenga: What does your average day look like?

Bilal Kathrada: The first few hours of my day are focused on content creation and this will take the form of tutorial videos, online advice, podcasts, or any other free content that we put out. Some days I might plan new courses or improve our existing offerings.

The next portion of my day is spent catching up with students around the country. The last part of the day I usually reserve for meetings. That could mean networking with business people, companies, or corporates. I spend my evenings researching. If my article is due the next day or in a few days, I'll do research for that.

The risk of burnout

Geertjan Wielenga: What I've noticed with people in the advocacy field is that they're very passionate. The flip side of that is burnout and exhaustion. Have you encountered that and do you have any insights about it?

Bilal Kathrada: Yes, I've experienced that. About eight months ago, I got sick very frequently and my doctor was concerned. It wasn't one related illness but many different ones. He warned me and said that it was all related to stress.

"I remove myself from tech and when I come back to it, I have better ideas."

—Bilal Kathrada

Since then, I've disciplined myself to do exercise and eat well. I also take time out. Every three months, we make it a point as a family to disappear for three or four days into the wilderness. That could be going camping or into the mountains. I remove myself from tech and when I come back to it, I have better ideas.

The engine needs time to cool off. My family plays an important role in avoiding burnout. Our wives know us better than we know ourselves! My wife acts as an early warning system that I'm getting stressed.

Geertjan Wielenga: How do you keep up to date with tech?

Bilal Kathrada: I read a lot. I subscribe to Feedly, read websites and blogs, and follow people on Twitter to find out what's going on in particular areas. I also network with companies. I was talking to a company the other day that said that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a big thing. That surprised me because I thought that Microsoft Azure would be bigger. The feedback I received was that AWS seems to be doing better than Azure in South Africa. Those are the insights that you can get from speaking to people in the industry.

Geertjan Wielenga: As a young person, did you envisage this path for yourself?

Bilal Kathrada: No, but what I'm doing now addresses the problem that I faced as a young person: gaining real and practical coding skills. I started coding when I was a child in the '80s. Coding wasn't even a popular thing. I started with BASIC on my Commodore computer.

When I needed to choose a career, everybody was passionate about their own direction in tech. It was confusing. I was worried about making a move in one direction and then finding out that those skills were no longer in demand several years later. It was a scary decision.

Fortunately, I networked with people who recommended Java to me, but within Java itself, there are so many fields. In those days, I was writing Java applets or Java full-stack applications. I needed mentors and I needed to know where to go to learn about tech. I now offer mentorship for free to anybody who needs it and I light a clear path to learning.

As much as I'm passionate about Java and the Java ecosystem, I'm not a radical; I'm not religious about it. People often get into extended debates, but we need to keep an open mind. I help to get people into the development space in a way that is fun and accessible.

Geertjan Wielenga: Thank you, Bilal Kathrada.