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How local government can build the future of public works engineering

By intouch * posted 10-08-2017 10:46

  

Public works engineers create the local infrastructure that underpins community wellbeing and social inclusion. But as a large proportion of public works professionals march toward retirement and the industry struggles to attract and retain younger talent, many of these vital public assets may soon be at risk.


Public works is among the sectors to be hardest hit by the widespread skills shortage in engineering. While local government experts warn of an unprecedented talent gap over the next decade, investment in public infrastructure across Australia and New Zealand looks set to grow. The Australian Government recently announced an additional $200 million for the Building Better Regions Fund (BBRF) to support the construction of community infrastructure. In New Zealand, a recent report from PwC notes that infrastructure spending is expected to increase to $28 billion by 2025. Much of this investment will be placed in public works and the need to attract new engineers to the profession has never been greater.

A public works image problem 

The current workforce challenge is a matter of quantity, not quality. IPWEA New Zealand recently established a project team to investigate the nature and scale of the talent shortage. The resulting report, Fostering our Future, found that while a skills gap does not currently exist, the profession is approaching a capability crisis unless it addresses the problem of employee attraction and retention.

Screen_Shot_2017-08-10_at_10_43_11_AM.png“I think we have an image problem and that’s part of the battle,” says Peter Nyugen, Manager Project Development at Ryde City Council in northern Sydney. “A lot of younger graduates think that local government might be a step backwards in their career path. They think they’ll just be doing bread-and-butter work like driveway levels and drainage and that they’ll be pigeonholed. We’re also competing with big private companies and large-scale projects, like Barangaroo. A lot of young people want that on their CV, even if they are just working as a gopher.”

Many graduates are dazzled by dollars, adds Nyugen. “We sometimes don’t pay as much as the private sector, so we have to up-sell our other benefits, like work-life balance, [vehicle] leasebacks and the variety of work employees will experience,” he says. “We have people coming in through our cadet rotation program and non-paid work experience and I always say to them that we offer a smorgasbord. They’ll get a taste of different areas but they won’t be working six days a week and 60 hours like they may in the private sector.” Vaughn Crowther, Infrastructure Advisor at Rationale, which aims to improve infrastructure outcomes across communities in New Zealand, agrees that changing how the profession is marketed is a key step in attracting more talent. “We need to repurpose and resell our work to the younger generation to show how the work that we do underpins the prosperity of their community,” he states. “Being able to give people clean drinking water and flushing toilets may sound pretty straightforward but if you repurpose it in the context of somewhere like Christchurch, it becomes more compelling. After the earthquake five years ago, the people of Christchurch would have given their right arm for clean drinking water and flushing toilets because they didn’t have them for months on end.”

Crowther adds that it’s not only the public works profession that suffers from an image problem. He thinks younger generations are also misunderstood. “I think there’s a greater sense of altruism coming through in the younger generation,” he says. “They actually want to make a difference in the world. I recently spoke to a group of about 200 engineering students at Canterbury University and the overwhelming thing that I took away was that these kids are so positive in wanting to contribute and work hard and work collaboratively. I thought, ‘Wow, we actually don’t know this generation at all. We think we do, but we don’t.”

The value of education

Angela Christie, who leads New Zealand’s Engineering e2e program, believes that attracting young talent to the public works profession must start before they reach tertiary studies. Rather than a negative perception of the profession, she believes there is a lack of awareness of what public works engineers actually do. “They play a vital role in society and I think that would be quite engaging for kids,” she says.

Engineers e2e, which recently formed a memorandum of understanding with IPWEA NZ to collaborate on a number of initiatives, was established by the New Zealand Government in 2014 to find more ways of attracting students to engineering studies. Its aim is to boost the number of engineering graduates by 500 per annum from 2017 and launched a major public awareness campaign in May last year called ‘Make the World’. It included young engineers and the vital role they play. “It was an impressive campaign and it has helped raise the career consideration ranking for engineering in New Zealand from tenth to third place,” says Christie.

It’s one thing to entice students to study engineering at tertiary level and quite another to encourage them into a career in public works. The engineering faculty at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst is aiming to address this through a new civil engineering program that incorporates four years of work placements with a strong focus on developing practical, job-ready graduates who are prepared to work in rural and regional settings.

Joshua Devitt, Engineer in Residence, at Charles Stuart University, explains that 35% of placements this year have been with local government. “We’re trying to prepare student and cadet engineers for the realities of working in engineering,” he says. “Even among engineering students, there is a lack of awareness about what engineers actually do. There’s also a perception that local government is just a bunch of blokes leaning on shovels. I’ve worked with seven local councils in my career and did a bit of everything, from infrastructure to project management. These work placements will hopefully help change perceptions of what actually goes on in the sector.”

Building career pathways

Hume City Council in Melbourne is one local government that aims to engage directly with engineering students through its work experience program, which it has been running for approximately 10 years. It advertises on university websites in August each year and interviews applicants over the following months in order to secure placements for up to eight students over the university summer break.

David Fricke, Hume City Council Manager Engineering and Assets, explains that council employs around 25 engineers and receives more than 100 applicants for its work experience program each year.

“It has a range of benefits,” says Fricke, “Not only does it help us attract graduates, it also gives our engineers career development opportunities because each student is mentored by someone here.”

Fricke explains that students gain experience in areas such as traffic management, asset management and civil design. “They might work on basic design projects like car parks so they get to do some CAD (computer-aided design) work, or road subdivisions,” he says. “Most of our graduate employees have been through our work experience program and they have wanted to come back.”

While Hume City Council has a well-oiled work experience program, Crowther notes that many local council cadetship programs are arranged in an ad hoc manner. “They may be organised because someone on reception knows someone who’s studying engineering as opposed to looking at the range of projects that a local government may need help with and approaching it from that direction,” he says.

“Is there a way that we can liaise more closely with education providers and see what sorts of programs we can come up with to supply the skills for these projects and can we do it collectively across a region?” asks Crowther. “If we begin to see a gap in our profession, then why can’t we work together as councils and education providers to offer programs where people can learn in a space of three to four years by jumping around employers, for example, for six months at a time.

Rather than aiming to trump the existing cadetship programs, Crowther suggests that this solution could complement them. “In the longer term, you’ll get a better-rounded, better educated and better prepared public works engineer as a result of it.”

This story is an except from the feature 'Building our future', published in the July/Aug edition of inspire magazine. You can read the full article here.
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