According to Engineering News, while there is a strong demand for engineering candidates generally, there are a handful of highly sought-after skills that South Africa’s engineering employers look for when hiring potential employees, says recruiter Bella Nxumelo, of Network Recruitment.
Black engineers with experience working on the national energy grid and transformer designers with seven to ten years’ experience were currently topping South African employers’ lists.“Sales engineers with three to seven years’ experience and a proven sales record in the automation, drives and factory automation industries, as well as embedded software development engineer graduates, are also high in the employment list,” she said.
“In-demand skills are mostly scarce skills. Employers are acutely aware of this and have adopted appealing retention strategies to ensure that, once they’ve attracted these skills, they’re able to successfully retain them,” she said.
This had left a significant dearth of skills in some areas, said Nxumelo, citing embedded software engineers, where candidates were often snapped up at varsity level before they reached the open market.
