South Africa’s mining sector risks losing scarce engineering skills as professional registration remains less highly valued locally than in overseas markets, according to Kondwani Banda, chair of the Southern African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy’s (SAIMM) continuous professional development committee.Speaking to Business Day on the sidelines of the Electra Mining Expo at Nasrec Expo Centre on Monday, Banda said professional registration, intended to demonstrate an engineer’s competence and accountability, often carried more weight outside South Africa than it did in parts of the local mining industry.He said this could affect the industry’s ability to retain engineers, particularly where professionally registered engineers were not necessarily given greater career opportunities or responsibility.“You find that people end up migrating because the certification holds more weight outside of South Africa than it would locally,” Banda said.The comments come as South Africa faces continued difficulty in finding engineering skills. The Xpatweb Critical Skills Survey found that 38% of employers struggled to recruit engineers in 2025, up from 23% in 2024 and 14% in 2018.Speaking at the Mining Indaba earlier this year, Wits associate professor Glen Nwaila said South Africa’s mining and geoscience schools enrol 500-700 undergraduates a year, but that about 30% of graduates don’t end up working in the fields they trained in, and about a quarter leave to work overseas.According to Comodex Consultancy MD Tanya Graham, the gap between universities and industry remains a challenge, with employers expecting graduates to be ready to perform as soon as they enter the workplace. Speaking at a seminar at the expo on Monday, she said qualifications alone did not make graduates competent, with students needing practical exposure, feedback, mentorship and opportunities to apply what they had learnt before entering the industry.Banda said the problem was also linked to the career paths available to engineers once they entered mining companies.He said some young engineers remained in junior positions for too long because companies did not provide structured development programmes that increased their responsibility and exposure as they gained experience.“Most engineers get frustrated by not having that clear view of where they’re going in their career. And I think most people find themselves being in junior positions for so long that eventually they leave the industry completely,” he said.The issue is becoming more important as the Engineering Council of South Africa (Ecsa) implements its Identification of Engineering Work (Idoew) framework.The rules, gazetted in March 2021, identify engineering work that falls within ECSA’s regulatory scope and specify work associated with different registration categories.Banda said the framework meant mining companies would need to look beyond simply having registered professionals somewhere in their organisations and ensure that the right registered professionals were responsible for the relevant engineering work.The framework does not mean every engineering activity at a mine must be performed by a professional engineer. Instead, the rules distinguish engineering work according to its complexity and the registration category required.Banda said professional registration should therefore be viewed as part of building capability rather than as an administrative burden.“I think it’s [the] opposite of it being a barrier. I think it’s more of an enabler,” he said.SAIMM is working with universities, industry and Ecsa to strengthen the pathway from university into professional registration. Banda said its accelerated registration programme takes between six and eight months and helps engineers map their work experience against Ecsa’s requirements.The institute is also encouraging employers to provide mentorship and structured development so that engineers can meet the required competencies earlier in their careers.Ecsa has not yet announced a new date for actively penalising employers using unregistered engineers following the implementation of the Idoew rules. However, Banda said companies should nevertheless begin preparing their engineering workforce for the requirements rather than wait for enforcement.Business Day