This new initiative is designed to improve learning opportunities for engineers at all stages of their careers, but with a particular focus on those at the start of their career. The Academy is run by experts within the field of HV engineering, including Joe Hughes (Director – HV), Alwyn Hanekom (Managing Director, Infrastructure, Government & Defence) and Ruy Menezes (Associate Director – HV), who will be leading a range of working groups, learning activities and technical training modules or lectures.
These opportunities will be open to all within the company, offering cross-discipline learning as well as more targeted skills sessions for those within HV. Guest lecturers on a range of relevant topics, such as commercial and civil & structural engineering, are also planned.
Director for HV Engineering at BakerHicks and founder of the Academy, Joe Hughes says:
We have a lot of very talented graduates and young engineers within BakerHicks and we wanted to provide a framework to support their career development. I’m enormously excited about the opportunities we’re going to be able to provide them through our HV Technical Academy of Excellence. We have some real industry leading expertise in the business who are committed to sharing this knowledge to help accelerate our young engineers’ learning.
As a sector, we have an enormous amount of really exciting and essential work to do as governments and businesses across the globe strive to achieve net zero. But we’re facing a very real skills shortage. HV engineering is something many fall into by accident, which has left the discipline lagging behind in terms of attracting talent. We hope that through the Academy we can introduce young engineers to HV engineering earlier in their careers and show them how rewarding it can be.
The first session took place in July, with all HV graduate engineers and some younger engineers in the dedicated power team within the civil & structural engineering discipline attending. Alwyn Hanekom provided an overview on contracts, followed by Lucas Wille (Director - Power) and Joe Hughes’ practical overview of how to manage and deliver a tender. An educational day was followed up by a team meal and social event.
