INTRODUCTION TO WILDERNESS

Thirty years ago the founders of Wilderness fell in love with remote and wild places in Africa. They realised that many of these places were not getting the attention they deserved.

The initial Wilderness dream was to conserve these places by enabling people to visit them and earn a return for the business and its employees at the same time. This was not a grand or complex idea but an important one. Wilderness started off by offering "journeys and experiences to discerning globally caring travelers", achieved through the employment of a responsible tourism model.

Wilderness began operating in Botswana and then spread out into the rest of southern Africa. Over time, the business has evolved into a specialist luxury safari operation with 58 different safari camps and lodges, comprising a total of 1 008 beds, in eight SADC countries and hosting in excess of 30 000 guests per annum.

OVERVIEW OF THE BUSINESS

Wilderness Holdings is a Botswana-based Company, listed on the Botswana Stock Exchange and with a secondary inward listing on the JSE Limited. The Company acts as the investment holding vehicle for the business.

The business is currently supported by international and local markets and has a value proposition of "selling original experiences in the pure wilderness". We sell these experiences to the consumers, our guests, largely through the travel trade, our clients. The Group has a stable of Wilderness brand which are supported by a flying business.

WILDERNESS VISION

The Wilderness vision is to be Africa's leading ecotourism organisation, creating life-changing journeys in order to build sustainable conservation economies and inspire positive action.

WILDERNESS VALUES

Values provide a moral compass and framework for decision-making and day to day operations within an organisation.
- Leadership: The courage to innovate in shaping a better Africa

• Authenticity: We always remain loyal to the Wilderness way

• Integrity: We are respectful, honest and ethical

• Fun: We enjoy making a difference and changing lives

• Accountability: We take responsibility for our actions

• Commitment: Our dedication to the environment and our guests is unwavering

WILDERNESS BLUEPRINT

• Commerce:
  We create life-changing wilderness journeys for our guests and clients and work closely with our Government partners,conservation and community stake holders and shareholders, to ensure the ongoing financial success and sustainability of our business.

• Conservation:
  We aim to maximize the positive impact of our operations on biodiversity conservation and to build and operate our camps in the most eco-friendly way possible to minimize our negative impact.

• Community:
  People are at the heart of our business. We hope to provide opportunities and growth to inspire our staff and external communities to learn about nature, love and conserve it and to realise the importance of ecotourism.

• Culture:
  We respect and promote our unique Wilderness culture, as well as those of all our employees and neighbouring rural communities. We hope to positively impact a global culture of respect and care for the environment.

THE IT DEPARTMENT

The IT department is partly based in our Joburg office in Sandton, and our Cape Town office is in Steenberg Business Park in Tokai. We are currently hiring for our team in Tokai.

We are a small development team, with a few staff members with a large amount of development and project experience, as well as a few more junior members. We are in the fifth year of an ambitious and exciting project. The project has proved successful but still has a long way to go to reach our intended goals. We are therefore looking to add people to our team with the necessary attitude, energy and enthusiasm to help us move forward. We have a relaxed working environment and like to have fun, but we are also prepared to put in the hours when necessary, and also work outside of our normal job description on an ad-hoc basis, such as assisting with support or training.

We work in a very agile environment. As a small team working closely together we dream, design, and develop together, as well as maintain, support and train. Releases to production generally occur on a daily basis. The business we are serving is complex, involves a large number exceptions to the standard processes, and is fast paced and constantly changing. A significant amount of the work we do involves challenging existing processes and looking for ways to improve them.

We are looking for a few additions to our team. We do need to add to our technical skills, but we are also looking for candidates who have business analysis and design skills, in addition to some technical know-how. The ability to understand data and perform data-modelling is a big plus.

Our primary development tool is Mendix. It is a model driven rapid application development tool, which allows us to operate in an agile manner. Please go to www.Mendix.com for further information.

Hiring process

There are three of us who will interview the candidates. There may be a couple iterations but we will try keep this to a minimum. The prospective employee once chosen will be on a 3 month probation period. We would like to contact past employers for references. If not possible for any reason, we may need to set some basic tasks.