To promote engineering as a career of choice, Consulting Engineers South Africa (CESA) and its Young Professionals Forum (YPF) has for the past decade celebrated Job Shadow Day aimed at attracting South Africa’s learners into becoming the country’s future engineers.
The initiative is geared towards showcasing the engineering profession, particularly consulting engineering as an exciting career option and also serves as a call to action for Engineering Corporates to develop a pipeline of much needed engineering professionals in South Africa.
CESA’s YPF Chairperson Amanda Masondo-Mkhize says June is a significant month to commemorate the role of youth in today’s liberated society. “To ignite and commemorate the resolve of those gallant students. I would like to urge all CESA member firms to partake in the Job Shadow Initiative and allow high school pupils to experience ‘A day in the life of a Consulting Engineer’,”
Since 2008, CESA’s Job Shadow Initiative has reached over 15 000 learners from previously disadvantaged backgrounds. In 2004 CESA established a young professional forum to expedite the development of practicing young professionals by creating focused platforms of interaction that could be utilised to address areas of development that were identified as lagging by these young practitioners.
Engineers are the main role players in the delivery of Infrastructure. By affording learners this opportunity they get to imagine, live, work and play Engineering – opening their minds to a world of possibilities.
The Job Shadow Initiative takes the form of a poster competition, from which the three best posters describing the learners’ experience having spent time with a member company get the recognition at the CESA Aon Engineering Excellence Awards which will be held on 16 August 2017. In 2016, Royal HaskoningDHV was the winner of the CESA Job Shadow Poster Competition with UWP Consulting and Nako ILISO as the runners-up.
The CESA Job Shadow Initiative has been expanded to include School Talks by individuals or organisations, who do notparticipate in the main Job Shadow programme. The School Talks were necessitated by the fact that many learners continue to struggle with Mathematics and end up doing Mathematics Literacy which limits them in their later career choices.
Contact Dennis Ndaba, Tel:011 463 2022 or mobile: 0785323100
dennis@cesa.co.za
