PERSONALITY PROFILE
63
PERSONALITY PROFILE
63
what I’d developed. But I couldn’t do so because the materials alone are of no value without appropriate
tuition. I took the teacher and trained him on the material up to a point where he was a qualified
plumber (as well as a teacher).
“Between the two of us we developed an entire curriculum and this has now spread to about five or six
schools, each of which are able to train a class in plumbing.”
He was also approached by Iopsa and GIZ (The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale
Zusammenarbeit GmbH, a German development agency headquartered in Bonn and Eschborn that
provides services in the field of international development cooperation) to help write the new plumbing
curriculum for the NOCC (National Occupational Curriculum Content) A21. “It was great to be able to
put all this information, which I’ve gathered through the years, into a strategy to formalise a national
training programme for qualification as a plumber, which we achieved about a year and a half ago.” The
programme is in its second year, with the ‘old’ and new curriculum running concurrently, as people had
started before the new programme was released. Gordon describes the old curriculum as antiquated.
The new curriculum brings in a lot of new plumbing technology and removed aspects that are seldom
any longer done, such as sheet metal work.
“For instance, part of the current exam to become a plumber is that a trainee has to bend his own cone
flashings and step flashings, whereas nobody does that anymore – you buy the manufactured item in a shop.
As one door closes, another opens
His tip for youngsters following in his footsteps is not to wait for others to give them knowledge or
even opportunity, but to create the opportunity themselves. “Success stems from the effort you put
in yourself, rather than waiting for somebody to come and feed you information or lead you to the
waterhole. Personally, I always wanted that knowledge.” He gives the analogy of him buying a new car
– when he buys it he takes the instruction manual and reads it cover to cover, “So that I understand this
car from bumper to bumper.” In a similar vein, his first action on arriving at CalAfrica was to study its
product catalogue cover to cover.
Another tip is to show respect to people, and he gives an anecdote of how he almost fell from grace
in his early career for this reason. “When I first started at the old Boumat group my new boss was
introduced to me as “Jack Jonker” and I proceeded to call him that. He took offence to that, saying
I should have called him “Mr Jonker”. Although I apologised, the company was in the process of a
retrenchment campaign, and because I had offended him, he retrenched me.
“However, I immediately went to another company where I put an emphasis on calling my new boss
‘Mnr Swanepoel’ but he, in turn, insisted upon a first name basis. So you have to understand who
you’re dealing with and what they want, and address them appropriately. Whether a person wants to be
called ‘Mr Engineer’, or whether it’s a humble plumber who does not want you to talk above his head,
you have to talk on their individual level. What has contributed much to my success is that I never talk
down to people but make sure I talk the same language as the audience.”
Another lesson from that anecdote, he says, is that as one door closes another opens. “I didn’t regret
being retrenched at all, as it opened up a new career path for me. Things happen in life – don’t fixate
on them, but rather use that energy to create something new.”
Other highlights of his career include being a regular radio presenter for a plumbing programme on Mix
FM (the Midrand station), as well as a being a regular contributor to this publication. “We often don’t
realise the impact we have on others people’s lives, but being in the public space like that brings a
humbling acknowledgement of what impact one can achieve.
“When you realise that people are touched by what you do, it’s highly fulfilling to know you’ve actually
achieved something, and that’s been the greatest highlight of my career to date,” says Gordon.
He says this as another door opens for him, “This [the CalAfrica job] is a much more focused challenge
for me now, as I have to lead the team with what is a much more focused offering than the 3 000
to 4 000 line items we had at Cobra. They are more technical products that I can really get my teeth
into, even though it’s a 10-person company compared to 1 300. It’s more hands on, with me getting
involved in the assembly and manufacture.
“All the products at CalAfrica are more complex and technical, each with SANS approval. It’s a good
quality product all imported from Italy – which is an additional reason I took this job,” he concludes. PA
August 2019 Volume 25 I Number 6
www.plumbingafrica.co.za