While there is a strong demand for engineering candidates generally, there are a handful of highly sought-after skills that South Africa’s engineering employers look for when hiring potential employees, says recruiter Bellah Nxumalo, of Network Recruitment.

According to Nxumalo, black engineers with experience working on the national energy grid and transformer designers with seven to ten years’ experience were currently topping South African employers’ lists.

“Sales engineers with three to seven years’ experience and a proven sales record in the automation, drives and factory automation industries, as well as embedded software development engineer graduates, are also high in the employment list,” she said.

Nxumalo added that positions involving sales engineers not only demanded the right technical qualifications, but also long-term tenures with companies.

Automation engineers, application engineers with more than five years’ experience working with drives, who would offer solutions for the mining, oil and gas industries, were currently more marketable than engineers with a Government Certificate of Competency (GCC) for factories. 

“In-demand skills are mostly scarce skills. Employers are acutely aware of this and have adopted appealing retention strategies to ensure that, once they’ve attracted these skills, they’re able to successfully retain them too,” she said.

This had left a significant dearth of skills in some areas, said Nxumalo, citing embedded software engineers, where candidates were often snapped up at varsity level before they reached the open market, as an example.

“It’s for these reasons that passionate engineering students should focus their studies on those areas where there is the most demand, and that young engineering professionals with some experience in these sectors should aim to gain the minimum experience necessary before moving on to positively grow their careers,” she concluded