Engineering Skills Survey – an opportunity for all engineering practitioners to be heard!

An engineering skills survey has been launched to investigate the extent of available engineering skills in South Africa. The survey, as initiated by the Engineering Council of South Africa (ECSA) and supported by the Departments of Higher Education and Training (DHET) and Economic Development (DED) as well as engineering voluntary associations, aims to inform national engineering skills planning. Data obtained through this survey will help build an updated picture of SA’s available engineering skills and guide future action required to strengthen the engineering skills pipeline as well as address needs voiced by practitioners.

The survey will focus on determining:

• how many engineers, engineering technologists, engineering technicians and associated engineering practitioners are currently employed in the engineering sector in South Africa including those educated locally and abroad;
• how many engineering practitioners per discipline are currently practising;
• the education and training routes followed by various categories of practitioners;
• how many practitioners are not registered professionally and why;
• the challenges faced by graduates requiring workplace training;
• the extent to which engineering practitioners have left the industry or the country and why.

"We really need to have a reliable set of statistics guiding our decisions on engineering skills development,” said ECSA council member Dr Allyson Lawless. "The country also needs to understand the bottlenecks with respect to development towards professional registration, as registration offers a measure of competence valuable not only to the employer, but essential to protect the public in terms of health and safety and responsible use of public funds.”

The information gathered will also help to establish the ratio between engineers, engineering technicians and technologists and the learning pathways followed to develop as engineering practitioners. The many routes followed to develop as engineering technicians or technologists in the past need to be explored to inform articulation, particularly from FET colleges to universities of technology.

Graduation figures for tertiary qualified technicians and technologists have only been consolidated since 1986; the number who graduated before this, and who would now be a skilled and experienced part of industry, is not clear."We possibly have a lot more engineering technicians and technologists than we give ourselves credit for, so we need to find out who is really out there and then do our planning on that basis,” she said. Government and industry also need to know that, when planning for large projects that require engineering skills, such as the Strategic Infrastructure Projects (SIPs), there are reliable data. This will allow that gap between engineering skills demand and supply to be determined for purposes of developing the skills pipeline.

"It is vital that more graduates become professionally registered”, said Lawless, "and the survey will feed into efforts to strengthen support for graduate training, including for example recognition of candidate training as a learning pathway, increased SETA funding for the candidate phase, and accessing retired mentors to provide structured workplace training for candidates against ECSA requirements”.

"We also have many qualified people from other countries working in our engineering sector,” said Lawless, "and we need to know how many there are and how we can help them register as professionals.”

The survey has been posted online so that it is easily accessed and quickly completed by all engineering sin SA and from SA, irrespective of where they are now.

The URL is http://edusurveys.co.za/opinio/s?s=103.

In order to reach as many engineering practitioners as possible, ECSA’s Acting CEO, Mr Edgar Sabela is calling on all interested and affected parties to support this campaign by informing their stakeholders, staff, colleagues and friends who have been part of the South African engineering industry at some time in their careers, of the survey and urging them to participate.

Feedback on the data obtained from the survey will be posted on the website during the two months that the campaign is running and a detailed report on the findings will be published in March 2014.