Young professionals urge senior colleagues to help them reach their full potential.

By Brian McCormack

In Victoria’s rural Gippsland, Kurt Pitts of Baw Baw Shire has added another feather to an already well plumed cap by playing a key role in putting Young IPWEA on the map. 

Checking pipes in rural towns for three months didn’t really fit with Kurt Pitts’ plans to be a structural engineer when he was a student at inner city Melbourne’s RMIT.

But that’s the gig he got during vocational employment in West Gippsland’s Baw Baw Shire. 

It was a hundred motorway clicks from Carlton’s cool coffee shops … but he loved it! 

In fact, he kept returning for different assignments until he was hired on the first rung of his career as a graduate engineer.

Now six years later, he’s climbed higher up that ladder to become Senior Subdivisions Engineer, Acting Coordinator of the Shire’s Infrastructure Growth Group, and one of the driving forces who helped put Young IPWEA on the map.

That’s often the way young careers pan out in public works.

“At university you can head in a certain engineering direction, but then you get a taste of local government and become smitten,” says Pitts.

“My first task back then involved asset management trials, so I drove all over the Shire measuring the drainage network to compare it with original drawings.

 “I got a feel for hydraulic engineering, and on subsequent visits learnt more about other aspects, like assessing the condition of assets, or creating a priority schedule for footpaths in parks and reserves.

“Soon I knew the Baw Baw territory pretty well and put my hand up to join.”

Shortly after that his manager urged him to join IPWEA, which became for him the perfect environment to gain a holistic view of public works engineering and swap ideas with contemporaries further afield.

He began helping administer the Gippsland Regional Group of IPWEA and is now its Convener.

He’s also notched up some coveted gongs along the way.

For instance, in 2011 IPWEAvic bestowed the Young Public Works Engineer of the Year Award on him for his solution on how to balance development with the preservation of rare fauna and flora.

Then later that year he picked up a National Emerging Leader Award at the IPWEA National Conference in Canberra.

In fact, it was at the Canberra event that he learnt a fledging under 35s network had just been started by IPWEA WA’s Division.

“I thought it was a great idea because it allowed younger members to discuss and analyse - in their own contemporary terms - all the good stuff they were absorbing via mainstream IPWEA,” says Pitts.

Similar thoughts about that parallel universe were occurring to other young members in other states, and it wasn’t long before WA’s original innovation was being fast-tracked towards a “national” destiny. 

The rest is history – the Young IPWEA network was launched nationally at the start of this year and young members are signing up fast to take advantage of a program comprising social events, technical tours, professional speakers and more.

Kurt Pitts has willingly taken on the Chair of Young IPWEAvic as yet another role in his busy life.

But don’t hold back in contacting him!

“I know what it's like to be a young engineer with a limited number of contemporaries of your own age to bounce ideas off,” he says.

“That’s precisely why we formed Young IPWEA.”

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