Globally, people with skills are in demand. Top-end executives with financial and strategic skills; engineers of all sorts; artisans in both the traditional trades and new digital technologies; nurses; and teachers - all now find themselves with the whole world to choose from.
Since skills follow money, it's not surprising that on the skills supply side SA's small and geographically distant economy is not winning the global battle. In the information technology sector, for instance, SA is a net exporter of skills. And when it comes to doctors it is estimated that up to 50% of medical graduates leave the country without practising here.
Engineers are particularly in demand due to large infrastructural expansion here, in China and elsewhere, with SA feeling the brunt of the global shortage. More than a third of municipalities, which directly provide the key services of electricity, water, road building and maintenance, were recently found to be without a single engineer.
WHAT IT MEANS
 About 50% of medical graduates leave SA
Poor education is affecting skills supply
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But there are many things that SA can do to improve its stakes in the global talent contest. In some areas the country is succeeding. But how SA fares will determine its ability to grow and prosper into the next generation.
The problem with SA's skills supply starts at the very bottom - a school system of poor quality with high levels of dysfunctionality.
In 2006, half of SA's high schools fared badly in the matric exam with a pass rate of less than 65%. Though the pass rate is often used as the key indicator of success or failure this can be misleading or even dangerous.
The compulsive focus on the matric pass rate by ministers of education between 1994 and 2004 led to distorted outcomes - matric pass rates were manipulated upwards while quality further down in the system deteriorated. New research commissioned by education minister Naledi Pandor and published in February shows that nearly half of all children drop out before matric.
Wits University professor of education Brahm Fleish says the failure of most primary schools to teach children to read and write fluently and do basic arithmetic is at the heart of the education and skills crisis.
The Western Cape education department, which tests all grade 6 learners every two years, provides a frightening illustration of the problem. In the latest round of results, only 5% of pupils at township schools could read at the expected level for their grade. Only 2% could do the maths.
Laying a foundation - An effective education system will help the supply of skills to boost SA's economy
The cause of the crisis, says Fleish, is poor teaching. Educating teachers entails improving their own subject knowledge - a difficult task - which is not likely to be solved within the next 10 years. Of concern is that government has few programmes in place to try to fix the system at this level.
Though the skills supply pipeline faces fundamental challenges at the entry point, it also has chronic problems at the exit point of the schooling system.
The technical college sector and apprenticeship system, which for generations had served to supply SA with skilled artisans (in trades reserved for whites), went into failure in the 1990s - the effects of which were felt only when the economy moved into a stronger growth phase from 2003.
The collapse was due to several reasons: first came the privatisation or corporatisation of the large parastatals of Iscor, Eskom and Sasol from where the majority of qualified artisans had historically emanated. A rationalisation of the mining industry added to the decline in artisan supply.
The recasting of the skills training legislation and architecture with the National Skills Development Act in 1998 left many employers confused, believing that the apprenticeship system had been replaced by the new learnership system. The collapse of indentured apprenticeship left SA with huge shortages.
By the time government's wheels ground into action in 2006 with the formation of the Joint Initiative to Acquire Priority Skills for SA (Jipsa) the situation was dire. Jipsa set itself a "stretch" target of increasing the output of artisans by 7 500/year to 12 500. Even this though, says Glen Fisher of the National Business Institute, was not expected to be enough to meet the needs of the public infra-structure investment programme that government had set its sights on after 2004.
The technical colleges - now renamed and remodelled as Further Education & Training (FET) colleges - had also fallen into disrepair over the transition period, becoming increasingly irrelevant, outdated and isolated from the practical world of work.
Students who did qualify were mostly unable to find jobs because of the wrong mix of skills and the limited pathway the colleges provided into the workplace. The high dropout rates from school in the study that Pandor commissioned also illustrate the lack of alternatives, especially technical ones, that school leavers have faced in the past decade.
More progress has been made at correcting the problems at the exit end of the system than at the entry point. Apart from Jipsa's intervention to ensure that companies begin to train artisans again, the department of education has also overhauled the colleges, providing a new curriculum and recapitalising buildings and equipment.
Last year, the colleges commenced with the new curriculum, which focused strongly on producing engineering and ICT graduates as well as specialised skills for growth areas of the economy, such as tourism and hospitality. The results, however, were disappointing.
In an effort to ensure that college graduates emerge with well-rounded skills, mathematics was introduced as a compulsory course. Due to poor primary and high school maths education, nearly 80% of the first year cohort failed - meaning that it will take the economy longer than expected to produce technical skills via the college route.
On top of these failings in the supply system, for the past decade or more SA has been caught up in a complex political transition, which has skewed the demand for skills. Employment equity policies and the need for transformation, particularly of the state, has led to the premature loss of experience in crucial areas, particularly in engineering and top management.
An economist who frequently consults to government, Iraj Abedian, CEO of Pan African Advisory Services, describes this as the politicisation of the state.
"The challenge has to be to depoliticise the state. When a director or chief director is appointed, for instance, the primary criterion has to be competence, not loyalty or what he has done in the past," Abedian recently told the FM.
The distortion of demand led some skilled whites to seek employment elsewhere - which in the context of the global competition for skills, SA could ill afford. Several initiatives now exist to try to reverse this trend.
But with the production system failing at home, the only solution that remains is to import skills.
On this front, government has come a long way having shifted its mindset from the 1990s, when skilled foreigners were regarded as a threat rather than an asset.
A new immigration system has been in place since 2005 and immigration practitioners report a huge increase in the traffic of skilled people into SA.
"The number of people seeing SA as a destination to work in or emigrate to has increased steadily. A properly motivated application that is complete, we process through," says immigration lawyer Julian Pockroy.
New categories of permits - for scarce skills - are especially easy to come by. Under this permit, a person with particular skills may enter SA without a job offer and look for work.
But to really compete in the global talent stakes, SA needs an aggressive recruitment strategy in target countries, something that is lacking. Immigration agents from Australia, New Zealand and the UK spend large amounts of time recruiting inside SA. But SA doesn't follow a similar aggressive strategy.
With the skills supply side in serious danger that will not be easily resolved anytime soon, SA should beef up its performance in this area.
