Top tech companies to work for in South Africa

LinkedIn’s sixth annual Top Companies list revealed that the top-ranked telecommunications company through which to grow your career in South Africa is Vodacom.

The top five companies in South Africa are dominated by banks organisations, except for WPP — a multinational communications firm.

Vodacom came in eighth overall and is the country’s top-ranked telecoms company according to LinkedIn’s criteria.

It has 11,925 employees in South Africa — the highest of the non-banking organisations — and is only one of two telecommunications companies to make LinkedIn’s South African list.

Openserve, Telkom’s fibre network operator and infrastructure provider, is the only other South African telecoms company to make the list.

Amazon is also included in the top-ranked companies to work for in South Africa. The international giant has been operating its customer service unit in the country since 2010.

The majority of the skills and common job titles at Amazon in South Africa are customer service related. Still, the company’s cloud-computing division — Amazon Web Services — has been hiring in the country for some time now.

LinkedIn’s Top Companies report lists 25 of the best organisations to work for in South Africa. To qualify, they needed at least 500 employees on 31 December 2021.

LinkedIn bases the report on seven pillars that it says have been shown to result in career progression. They are:

• Ability to advance — LinkedIn tracks employee promotions within a company and moves to new companies based on standardised job titles.
• Skills growth — LinkedIn looks at how employees employee skill gains across a company, using standardised LinkedIn skills.
• Company stability — LinkedIn tracks attrition over the past year and the proportion of employees that stay with the company for a minimum of three years.
• External opportunity — LinkedIn looks at Recruiter outreach across employees at the company. This signals whether there is demand for workers coming from these companies.
• Company affinity — LinkedIn seeks to measure how supportive a company’s culture is. The measure looks at connections on LinkedIn among employees, controlled for company size.
• Gender diversity — LinkedIn measures gender equality within a company and its subsidiaries.
• Educational background — LinkedIn examines the variety of educational attainment among employees, from no qualification up to PhD levels. The measure reflects a commitment to recruiting a wide range of professionals.

The table below summarises the top 6 tech and telecoms companies to work for in South Africa, their employee base in the country, sought-after skills, and common job titles.

Main Image: African Vibes