Adapted from Tom McKune’s LinkedIn commentary.

“The registration path can be tricky and long — but with the right mindset and a group of dedicated mentors there to guide you, the road need not be long.”

I wrote those words to congratulate Nadine, a candidate who recently reached professional registration through the Maselulekane programme. They apply just as well to every candidate engineer, technologist and technician working towards ECSA registration today.

Why candidates stall

Most candidates who struggle to register do not lack technical ability. What they lack is structure: a clear development plan, regular progress tracking, and evidence that is gathered as the work happens rather than reconstructed in a panic before submission. Workplace experience only counts when it is mapped deliberately against the competency outcomes ECSA expects — and that mapping is hard to do alone, in between project deadlines.

What makes the road shorter

In the Maselulekane programme I watched candidates like Nadine and Mosa reach the finish line ahead of their peers. The difference was never talent. It was commitment plus guidance: mentors who knew the process, honest progress reviews, and a group of peers walking the same road who kept each other accountable. Mosa’s story made the point just as well — she not only applied herself, she helped others along the way, and that willingness to guide each other is exactly what the profession needs more of.

What this means for employers

If you employ candidate practitioners, you already have most of the raw material: real projects, real responsibility, real mentors in your senior staff. What turns that into registrations is structure. That is the work we do every day through ECSA Candidate Management — development planning, competency mapping, mentoring support and submission preparation — and it is why we are building the Candidate Portal to make that structure easier for employers to maintain.

The road to registration does not have to be long. But nobody should have to walk it without a map.

Adapted from Tom McKune’s LinkedIn commentary.

Public-private partnerships are the most effective way to deliver large infrastructure projects without corruption taking its toll.

That is a strong claim, and after almost five decades in civil engineering I make it deliberately. South Africa needs infrastructure delivered at pace — roads, water, energy, schools — and the public fiscus cannot carry that burden alone. But the argument for PPPs is not only financial. It is structural.

Accountability is built into the model

In a well-structured PPP, the private partner carries real risk: cost overruns, delays, long-term performance. Payment follows performance over the life of the asset, not just its completion. When a consortium knows it must maintain what it builds for twenty or thirty years, quality stops being a negotiable extra and becomes the business model.

Transparency is harder to bypass

PPP contracts put scope, standards, penalties and payment mechanisms on the table before work begins, with lenders and independent certifiers watching alongside the state. Multiple parties with money at stake means multiple sets of eyes on every variation and every invoice. That is not a guarantee of clean delivery — no model is — but it raises the cost of corruption considerably.

The skills dividend

There is a further benefit close to my heart. Large PPPs create exactly the kind of long-horizon, multi-disciplinary environments in which young engineers and technicians can gather the structured workplace experience they need for professional registration — if the project is set up to develop them deliberately. Infrastructure that builds people as well as assets is the best return on investment this country can make.

Adapted from Tom McKune’s LinkedIn commentary.

A somewhat unlikely combination, you might think. But in today’s unpredictable world — where the pace of change is regularly beaten to the post by escalating levels of uncertainty — bridging engineering and psychology could be just the symbiotic skill set young graduates in the built environment need in order to thrive, and not just survive.

Technical skill is the entry ticket, not the destination

Every year I meet graduates who are technically strong and professionally unprepared. They can run the calculations, but site life runs on people: contractors under pressure, communities with legitimate grievances, clients with changing briefs, teams carrying stress nobody talks about. The engineer who can read a room is often more valuable than the one who can only read a drawing.

What the psychological side adds

Understanding motivation, stress, communication and group dynamics is not “soft” knowledge — on a project it is load-bearing. It shows up in how you brief a team before a difficult pour, how you handle a dispute about measurements, how you mentor a candidate who is quietly losing confidence, and how you keep your own judgement sound when a project goes sideways.

A challenge to graduates and employers

To graduates: invest as deliberately in your people skills as in your technical CPD. To employers: when you plan a candidate’s development, include the human dimensions — communication, ethics, leadership under pressure — in the competency map, not as an afterthought. The built environment is built by people, for people. Engineering and psychology together is not an unlikely combination at all. It is the obvious one.

Adapted from Tom McKune’s LinkedIn commentary.

The role that Women in the Built Environment (WITBE) is playing to promote women into leadership in our industry is often underestimated.

I have watched the WITBE network grow into a community of hundreds of women across all disciplines of the built environment, in more than a dozen African countries and beyond — a space for social learning, collaborative mentoring and career networking that simply did not exist a few years ago. Credit goes to the founders who had the foresight to pursue their passion and create a safe space for women to share their experiences.

Why it matters to the whole industry

This is not a “women’s issue”. The built environment in South Africa cannot afford to sideline half its talent pool while it struggles with a skills shortage. Every firm that fails to retain and promote its women engineers, technologists and technicians is paying for recruitment it did not need to do — and losing leadership it desperately needs.

What actually moves the needle

From years of involvement in training and mentoring, three things make a measurable difference: visible senior women in leadership roles, structured mentoring rather than good intentions, and networks where experiences — including the hard ones — can be shared honestly. WITBE provides all three, which is why I promote its monthly sessions so consistently, and why I encourage every employer in our sector to get their women professionals involved.

The industry is changing. The organisations that help it change will be the ones that attract the talent everyone else is competing for.