Skills capacity issues affecting infrastructure

More needs to be done to recruit and retain skilled engineers for the entire life cycle of projects

Engineering skills and capacity have a significant impact on infrastructure delivery: ensuring water, transport and health infrastructure are in place for starters.

There is little doubt that there is a clear link between well-functioning infrastructure and a country’s economy. According to the recent IMD World Competitiveness Ranking, SA remains in the bottom 10 of a total of 63 countries assessed for their competitiveness. Those in the top 10 tend to have well maintained public infrastructure. As such, the infrastructure of a country should be regarded as a public asset.

According to the 2017 SA Institute of Civil Engineering’s (Saice) Infrastructure Report Card, which measures the state of the country’s infrastructure, one of the major themes emanating from all infrastructure sectors in the most recent report was the shortage of skilled personnel involved in the development of infrastructure and a lack of maintenance taking place.

As the Saice report points out, efficient maintenance of infrastructure is critical because, if infrastructure is not correctly maintained, its lifespan is shortened. Infrastructure, once created, is a demanding mistress. Miss out on crucial maintenance steps and costs will escalate.

While the engineering profession has long lamented the critical shortage of available engineering skills, industry association, Consulting Engineers SA (Cesa) says there just aren’t sufficient engineering jobs to go around. Most of Cesa’s member companies are in the process of cutting back on staff counts, says Cesa CEO Chris Campbell. “The irony is that as much as SA has a huge backlog in terms of infrastructure delivery, with the slowdown in government investment in infrastructure, there just aren’t sufficient projects to go round and not enough positions for consulting engineers,” he says.

“The result is that the gap, or what we call the ‘missing middle’, is getting wider as existing engineers get older and leave the industry, yet recently graduated engineers cannot find work.” He says this is despite the fact that the public sector has a huge shortage of experienced engineering skills, particularly at local government level.

One of the biggest challenges affecting the engineering sector is that the public sector — typically a large employer of engineering professionals — is procuring engineering skills on the basis of lowest possible cost rather than on appropriate and relevant experience, expertise and capacity.

“An average consulting engineering service costs about 2%-3% of the total cost of the asset over its 20-year life cycle,” says Campbell. “However, if the consulting engineer has the appropriate experience, they should be able to add considerable value in terms of project life cycle value, mitigating risk measures, long-term maintenance measures and overall specifications.”

Government procurement, instead of focusing on properly planned projects, tries to squeeze engineering consulting fees — even though that portion of the project accounts for only 2%-3% of the overall project life cycle cost — rather than focusing on ensuring value for money in the remaining 97% of the project life cycle cost.

Procurement within the public sector is a tick box exercise only, says Campbell, with those responsible for this critical area more fixated on compliance rather than ensuring they get value for money.

Infrastructure procurement should be a very different game from procuring stationery. Without the appropriate expertise projects end up being compromised, with the result that infrastructure delivery is once again jeopardised.

“Procurement officials need to be re-educated in terms of how to procure for infrastructure projects, and only competent service providers with the requisite skills and expertise should be allowed to tender for these kinds of projects, as opposed to the current system, which is purely cost-based,” he says. “This results in work going to companies without even a semblance of the most basic skills required,” says Campbell.

Though public sector employment figures have risen dramatically in the past few years, this has not been accompanied by an increase in engineering capacity. Even when engineering skills are employed in the public sector they’re often not retained for long as a result of a lack of clear and flexible career paths.

“The ideal scenario would be a well capacitated public sector that understands its role in terms of infrastructure procurement and delivery as well as its assets,” says Campbell.