The Durban branch held its last Technology Evening of 2011 on 7 December at the Westville Country Club. It was attended by key members and senior staff from Durban’s learning institutions and was hosted by Yokogawa who provided specialist speaker, Bruce Bonte, its current training facilitator for Africa.
Bruce (r) being thanked by branch chairman John Owen-Ellis after the presentation
Bruce gave a presentation entitled ‘A model to combat the skills shortage’. 22 year’s experience as an instrument mechanician in the process control and instrumentation arena helped to give his talk a well-received practical emphasis as he described the 3-year internship model which Yokogawa offer to promising students. It was generally acknowledged that South African industry has battled to find appropriately skilled people to employ in the field of automation and the approach as presented by Bruce has shown that it is capable of producing some much-needed skilled human resources.
The topic generated considerable discussion during which it was evident that there is much uncertainty surrounding changes to technical training courses and qualifications. Concerns were expressed about how appropriate these changes might, or might not, be to the production of suitable potential employees for the benefit of both individuals and industry. Internship certainly makes a positive contribution and more initiatives of a similar nature could only benefit the country by producing people who have had the opportunity of gaining their practical experience in a structured manner under expert guidance.
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