MTN Group has said that its South African unit plans to hire 150 “digital experts” to meet what it calls “growing demand” for digital services.
The news is a welcome respite following the waves of job losses across the sector in the past couple of years, especially in the IT services market, which has been hit by job losses at Telkom-owned BCX and at EOH Holdings, among others.
MTN South Africa chief of human resources Tebogo Maenetja said in a statement that the company is looking for youngsters to join it, as well as people with “high-level digital skills and aptitude”.
Specifically, it said, it’s looking for user experience and user interface designers; product owners; performance marketers; digital content specialists; e-commerce experts; full-stack developers; “scrum masters” (presumably unrelated to its sponsorship of the Springbok rugby team); and business analysts.
Ghana
Meanwhile, in Ghana, MTN is vigorously pursuing the group’s Agenda 2025 strategy, which is essentially a designed to make MTN go completely digital and actually become a platform player where other players in the tech ecosystem can plug in a play.
Agenda 2025 has five main pillar – Digital Service (Ayoba), Mobile Finance, Network as a Service (NaaS), Enterprise Services and API Marketplace (Chenosis).
As such, MTN Ghana has targeted 2023 (next year) to become a fully digital operator, where customers can only access services and interact with the company via its digital channels.
As part of that process, MTN Ghana is cutting down on the production of physical recharge cards and encouraging customers to use more digital channels to purchase and load airtime/data. The company, for instance, offers bonus to customers who acquire airtime/data via digital channels.
Meanwhile, MTN Ghana has not announced any recruitment of more digital experts to man the rollout of its digital strategy.
