Skills shortage in transportation engineering - education perspective

Abstract

Paper presented at the 30th Annual Southern African Transport Conference 11-14 July 2011 "Africa on the Move", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa.When navigating through the American pavement website of http://pavementinteractive.org one identifies South Africa's CSlR as one of the participants in this informative websites. Apart from this, South Africa's contribution in the current state of art in Pavement Engineering is well recognized internationally (Monismith, 2004). In his presentation Monismith continually made reference to work of South African engineers such as P. Rigden, C.Freeme, H. Maree and others. An inference that one makes from the above is that at some point in time in history this country was doing very well in terms of quality of engineers that were produced. However, there is an outcry at the moment that engineering field is facing serous skills shortage from two perspectives, numbers and competence. This situation is more prevalent in government, arms-length institutions, local government and also institutions of higher learning. This is attributed to failure of above mentioned institutions to retain staff. Apart from this there has also been brain-drain to the disadvantage of South Africa to overseas countries.