Manningham City Council - Municipal Depot Project Engineer Daniel Kelabora talks cadetships, the branding issue faced by public works and what needs to be done to bring young people into the profession.
Q. Why are cadetships so important for the industry?
A. Investing in those wanting to make a career in engineering is investing in engineering’s future, the subsistence of the industry is reliant on attracting the right people to come through the ranks. The security of a cadetship to allows someone to stand up amongst peers and become a champion for engineering. This increases the appeal of the profession.
Q. You completed a cadetship at Manningham Council in Victoria. Tell me about your experience.
A. In my second year studying I was working a retail job on the weekend to support myself and thought, “Why am I still working retail while studying engineering?”. Consequently I did a geographical search for all civil engineering related businesses close to me and approached them about taking me on. Through the geographical lottery I was fortunate enough to be near Manningham Council that ran, but did not advertise, a cadet program.
The immediate niche that I filled was in drainage investigations and delivery of the miscellaneous drainage program. This was just in time for significant storm events and associated flooding that occurred in 2010-2011. Following a request from the community I would investigate the source of flooding complaints, be it from private or public areas, and negotiate maintenance/upgrade of private assets or make recommendations for flood mitigating drainage improvements.
The overwhelming backlog of requests for help from the community, sometimes over 300 investigations from a single storm event, took several years to fully assess and respond with capital works.
I also had later rotations through survey assistant and street lighting enquiries.
Q. What did you take away from the experience?
A. The dichotomy of engineering and the community - its power to improve when considered necessary but also be maligned and challenged when at odds with individual agendas.
In response to a recent flood event, there is much greater public appetite for an engineering response. It is more difficult to muster the same support to for an engineering response to a modelled flood event that has not have occurred in the last decade. In an age where everybody with access to the internet is an expert, the reasoning and critical thinking with which an engineer presents recommendations as an expert is not given the required gravitas when contrasted against the noise of internet experts and squeaky wheels.
Q. How has your cadetship helped you in your career?
A. Being only two years out of university, I believe that it has given me a breadth of experience across all of the Engineers Australia (EA) professional competencies and an excellent foundation for me to progress my career. This has been prima facie confirmed by my IPWEA mentor, which offers me reassurance. What I do with this in the future, we’ll have to wait and see.
Q. I understand that you offer a cadetship at Manningham Council, tell me about the program.
A. The Council is listed as an employer with Swinburne University’s Industry Based Learning unit as part of their Civil Engineering degree. The students spend a year working at Council full time with periodic visits from their supervisors to check progress.
Currently we offer one full time cadet position and two 0.3EFT part time positions. The full time position is offered to students at Swinburne University where the Engineering Technical Services manager completed his degree.
All but two of the engineers employed at Council under the age of 35 came up through the engineering cadet program. Because of their familiarity with internal systems and tailored training a cadet that has graduated makes for a very strong candidate for positions that become available within Council’s engineering directorate.
Q. What advice would you give other looking to set up their own cadetships?
A. That having cadets offers your organisation flexibility and adaptability. Tailoring the training provided to cadets allows you to nurture the right staff to reflect changing needs within the organisation. The support and investment in a cadet fosters loyalty.
Q. Does public works have a branding issue?
A. Absolutely, there is no brand management. At its heart public works is the original social enterprise. However, today it is perceived as social enterprise institutionalised, bureaucratised and often politicised.
If Engineers Without Borders (EWB) present programs to students that takes you to developing countries to work on drinking water supply projects, it is perceived in a completely different light to working for a water authority doing the same thing in Australia. The role of the engineer is the same, but perceptions of need and admiration are different – the brand is different.
Councils are the most engaged level of government with the community but this broad range of services mean they are a soft target of criticism and synonymous with inefficiency. Within this paradigm, the opportunity for the engineering profession to demonstrate leadership can be kowtowed to politicking. Additionally, Councils are ubiquitous – the brand is watered down.
In my experience amongst peers at university, local government is also seen as menial backwater for deadwood. I see this as a fallacy and turns one of the strengths of local government on its head – loyalty. The guaranteed revenue of local government insulates it from the industry peaks and troughs experienced by private industry and associated retrenchments. The absence of chargeable utilisation pressure in public work reduces stress and permits time for staff development. With respect to graduates, it means less pressure to be pigeonholed to profitability and more latitude for growth. Loyalty from the public work organisation is often repaid with long service, a demonstrable synergy and not a sign of organisational weakness. Graduates have the most to gain from this experience.
Another strength of local government experience is in working with multidisciplinary teams and with various stakeholders. This provides the opportunity to foster the engineering generalist or engineering collaborator. At university students are taught by technical experts, of their respective fields, that are there to continue their research as well as teach. There is no role model for the engineering collaborator.
Consequently, students will aspire to become technical experts that work with cutting edge organisations on the tallest towers or longest bridge. The everyday real magic of an engineering generalist is taking the concepts and plans presented to them and working collaboratively to actually create them in real life. Working with and managing various stakeholders is intrinsic to this success, but not directly taught in university. The engineering collaborator is the real hero but a silhouette when it comes to honours.
Q. What needs to be done to entice more young people into the profession?
A. Presence and coordination. The push to encourage school kids into the STEM professions is a great start. The next step is at the completion of university in competition for suitable graduates. Individual local government organisations are competing on the same field as national and international organisations for good graduates. It’s no wonder that a local council is considered as a second tier option to an organisation with offices around the globe.
The answer could lie in regional collaboration between local councils and coordination as a sector to compete against the much larger organisations for graduates. Public works engineers have a good story to tell and offer a fantastic opportunity to graduates but are too fragmented to deliver the message.
Q. What about the industry do you most enjoy and why?
A. The social enterprise of engineering. The projects that we do in local government are not for profit and provide a direct positive effect to the community. It’s easy to lose the context that we are improving people’s lives with our work. That gives me the most satisfaction.
And I like earth moving machinery.