Metro plan to improve staff skills
The Nelson Mandela Bay municipality is on a mission to professionalise its workforce, particularly in the engineering department, because the city has only one professional city engineer.
The metro is also working on succession plans in various departments to ensure that it does not suffer a skills shortage when its older staff retire.
The metro’s only registered professional engineer is infrastructure and engineering executive director Walter Shaidi.
Human resources and corporate services portfolio head Annette Lovemore said this was unacceptable.
She said various departments would present reports to her committee on the city’s workforce to determine the average age of staff.
This would inform its succession plan.
She made the comments during a presentation on skills development in the city last week.
Lovemore said that the metro’s acting executive director, Nosipho Xhego, was looking at two matters pertinent to skills development.
“The one aspect is the age of our workforce. We need to start looking at that and our succession planning.
“The other aspect is the professionalisation of our workforce such as auditors, valuers,” Lovemore said.
“Engineers can get professionally registered in infrastructure and engineering and we have one, possibly two.
“This is unacceptable in the metro. We need to look at ways which we can incentivise professionalisation amongst our workforce,” she said.
Xhego said: “The process going forward is that when we have received all the forms from staff we will be able to analyse what we have in the institution and form a plan going forward.”
She said another issue was that the metro’s workplace plan did not match gaps that had been picked up in the municipality.