The study intends to shed light on which employers are attracting talent across Africa and why. With 30,000+ responses, this is a really robust piece of research which should be useful to employers and talent focused on the continent.
The big change for 2019 is our split ranking of international and regional brands. In previous years, we’ve ranked them alongside each other, but there are three reasons for the adjustment:
Brands with a wider presence are naturally more competitive. This is still the case for region brands with a pan-African scope, but international brands often drew a natural advantage from this is a combined ranking.
We wanted to get a better view, country by country, of the most interesting employers. You’ll see from the infographic map of the most popular brands in each country that while you often see the same international brands topping the rankings in multiple locations, there is a much more diverse picture for regional brands.
We wanted to ensure that Careers in Africa Employer of Choice was generating awareness of and interest in regional brands. In previous years, around 70% of the ranked companies have been international brands, so equalising the number allows us to feature far more organisations who are focused on Africa. There are more regional brands, employing more people, so it makes sense to give them greater exposure.
The trickiest part of this was defining what makes a brand international or regional. Given shared ownership, representative offices, distributor models and things like that, it’s not a straightforward definition. Therefore, we focused on the brands themselves, and whether those brands were originally, or predominantly, focused on Africa. It’s not ultra-scientific, but we think it suits the person of the study.
The survey underpinning the study segments respondents by demographic group and works by asking everyone to select one international brand they would like to work for, and one regional. For each brand, they rated the organisation against a number of attraction drivers (reasons someone would work for an organisation). We also asked respondents to give us the main reason they selected each employer from a list of choices.
The drivers included:
Culture
Opportunity to make a business impact
Progression and advancement
Opportunity to impact society
Senior leadership
Development
Reward
This left us with data on the popularity of employers and perceptions of their performance against a range of factors. To bring this together into a coherent index, we first weighted the data to ensure country populations were reflected, then averaged the ratings for the brands across all attraction drivers. We looked at the popularity of the brand and its average driver rating in terms of difference from the average, adjusting those numbers so that popularity and attraction driver perception equal impact on the final index, where the highest scoring organisations in the international brands ranking and the regional brands ranking become our Careers in Africa Employers of Choice for 2019.
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