CASE SHORTCUTS

Talent management with Merchants SA

In Case Shortcuts, we head behind-the-scenes of cases in the classroom where we experience the neat intersection of the company from a case with our students. We caught up with Merchants SA MD Zain Patel and Director of Transformation Sydwell Shikweni after their recent guest session.

When companies enter one of our lecture theatres it usually means that we are in for an exhilarating and insightful session. It was no different when Merchants SA showed up for a deep dive on the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry on the back of their teaching case “Merchants SA: Talent management tension in growing the business process outsourcing industry in South Africa”. Zain Patel (MD) and Sydwell Shikweni (Director of Transformation) interacted with the talented MBA class during the Purposeful People Management module with Professor Linda Ronnie. UCT GSB CWC stepped into the podcast studio shortly afterwards to hear about their key takeaways from the experience. Have a listen for the company viewpoint.

“A strong takeaway is what are the jobs of the future and what are the readiness protocols that’s required to get people ready for those kind of jobs especially where there’s an intersect between AI and generative AI, technology and traditional workers. And there’s a sense of curiosity when we closed off from the learners in terms of solving those problems, which I think is very exciting.” - Zain Patel, MD Merchants SA

“If you look at the makeup of the students in terms of the mix and the different geographies and the demographic makeup of the class itself, questions are coming from different perspectives… You’ve got seven countries other than SA from the continental Africa region, the US and some other countries. And with their insights on South Africa, you can tell they really do research to understand the landscape of the country overall.” - Sydwell Shikweni, Director of Transformation Merchants SA