Engineers in a developing country: the profession and education of engineering professionals in South Africa

Abstract

Economic growth in South Africa depends on engineering capacity to provide state-of-the-art, safe infrastructure for service delivery. At the same time the new democracy needs to address transformation. This monograph explores current capacity to address these challenges.

The study provides a demographic analysis of employment trends across the public and private sectors of the economy, and investigates the demand for engineers, technologists and technicians in the workforce. A comprehensive analysis of the educational context for engineering professionals focuses on enrolment, graduation and throughput trends in all engineering disciplines at universities and universities of technology, and reveals that although there have been positive innovations in education and training strategies in recent years, many issues, especially at secondary school level, remain a challenge.

Women in engineering is a particular focus of this study, which devotes a chapter to examining the factors that influence their choice of career, the barriers they experience in the labour market and strategies for encouraging women into the profession.

This comprehensive monograph offers valuable quantitative and qualitative information about engineering capacity across all engineering disciplines in South Africa. It is therefore an important reference for all engineering academics as well as decision-makers in both the private and public sectors, and will be useful to aspiring and current engineering students, whatever their field.

This study forms part of a broader project on professions and professional education within the HSRC Research Programme on Education, Science and Skills Development (ESSD).The research focus of ESSD is wide, spanning three major social domains: the education system, the national system of innovation, and the world of work. The programme is distinctive in that it is able to conduct research at the interface of these domains, to produce comprehensive, integrated and holistic analyses of the pathways of learners through schooling, further and higher education into the labour market and the national system of innovation.