Engineers have a role in every port

By Margot Shave  

There are times in a person’s career when a job comes along that is not than just a stepping stone to the next position but a springboard to a long and successful working life.

For mechanical and civil engineers, a job on a port expansion project, with its breadth of complex technical and managerial requirements, is the type of job you want on your resume if you aim to become a business leader in the industry one day, according to Brendan Petersen, general manager of John Holland’s energy and resources business.

After recently winning a $276 million contract with Rio Tinto to construct a 920m jetty, berths and ship-loading facilities at Cape Lambert in Western Australia, John Holland has several mechanical and civil engineering positions advertised, including project and more senior engineers. Petersen predicts his department will continue recruiting for the foreseeable future.

“I always tell people these jobs come with good views from the site office, which could be two or three kilometres out to sea,” Petersen says. “What other job gives you the luxury of being surrounded by schools of fish, whales and bird life?”

The role of project engineer is suited to a more junior engineer, perhaps with only three to five years’ experience. Although it requires some flexibility because of the fly-in, fly-out aspects of the job, it comes with unique challenges associated with building a temporary structure on land, then delivering the product out to sea.

The beauty of the job, as Petersen sees it, is it offers a chance to become highly specialised in the technical engineering around ports; others use these roles to gain excellent planning skills, which are important building blocks for the rest of their career.

The company’s port expansion contract comes on the back of other recent infrastructure projects in the resources sector, including the expansion of the Abbot Point coal terminal in Bowen, Dalrymple Bay terminal in Mackay and the RG Tanna terminal in Gladstone, all in Queensland.

Efficient ports that can adequately handle the capacity from Australia’s mining and resources businesses are intricately linked to increased production and growth for the sector.

“We see ports as the gateway for Australia to send our resources out to developing nations and there’s nothing more tangible than building ports and hence [they are] a big area of focus for us,” Petersen says.

While some of the ports servicing the mining sector are privately funded and operated, others are shared between several companies, as is often the case in Queensland, Petersen says.

“There’s a very complex question to be solved in the combination of mine-to-rail-to-port, and Queensland and Western Australia take different approaches. There is the fully integrated approach in Western Australia [taken] by some of the blue-chip mining companies, whereas Queensland has a lot of shared infrastructure,” he says.

“Whichever one of those is used, the final building block in making it effective is a port. If you get the mine and the rail right and don’t get the port right, you simply don’t have a good solution.”

Given the renewed boom in resources and increased investment in infrastructure servicing the mining and gas operations, job prospects for anyone with engineering qualifications continue to be healthy.

“We’ve been on a continual recruitment footing for the past 18 months,” Petersen says. “If all the projections are right and the Australian resources sector keeps developing its minerals and gas, then we will really struggle to fill the available roles.”

The company is interested in continuing the supply of engineers to the workforce and works with Central Queensland University to design programs for engineers to be industry-ready once they graduate.

“There is a risk that you lose graduates to other industries such as IT and biotechnology after a few years in the workforce because the job turned out to be different from what they expected,” Petersen says.

“We think it’s very important that university makes it clear to its students what it’s going to be like once they graduate and how to handle themselves once they’re in a workplace.”

The company has worked with the university to design a curriculum that highlights a range of skills, from leadership and communication skills and behavioural style to the management of technical skills, which are crucial to being a successful engineer.

“It’s like an engineer’s bedside manner,” says Petersen, “it just makes them a better engineer.”

Article from The Australian, October 9, 2010.