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BUSINESS AND TRAINING
IOPSA and PIRB want to
‘share the love’
By Eamonn Ryan
IOPSA and PIRB have inaugurated a five-year training strategy
development process to establish a directed approach to training
within the plumbing profession.
Much work is already being done, as outlined
in various board report-backs and regular
Plumbers’ Evenings, but the objective of
the strategy was greater alignment of those
activities by all role-players and tabulation
of everything taking place to give a more
accurate dashboard of what exactly is being
done to transform and uplift the industry.
hosted by Jess Roussos, co-founder of consulting firm
BluLever Education.
Lea Smith opened the discussion by explaining that
IOPSA now had a 30-year history and PRB ten, during
which, “we’ve been doing things in a very haphazard
way, even though in the last four years we have been
going from strength to strength”.
“There are a number of different projects on the
table, but we haven‘t previously had a five-year
strategic document aimed at galvanising everything
together with a long-term objective. That is the
purpose in bringing us together today - to henceforth
ensure we are all going in the same direction.
Important components of this had already been
announced as individual initiatives: the internal
professional RPL and Master Plumber curriculum
programmes, the DSPP projects and the Centre of
Specialisation – but none of these talk to a single
directed process. This 2025 training strategy
document is an initiative we (PIRB) and IOPSA are
taking, and we are asking stakeholders to join us in
this specific journey,” says Smith.
Approximately a dozen role-players were brought
together to be briefed, to discuss the plan and to
be invited to join a planning committee to oversee
the development of the strategy document. In
attendance were IOPSA, PIRB, Plumbing Africa,
consultants, various training colleges and the German
development organisation GIZ. The workshop was
Apprentice research
BluLever noted 11 challenges and opportunities with apprenticeships (broadly, not just
plumbing):
The purpose of this initial workshop was to ensure all
the attending stakeholders:
The challenges:
• Mindset and millennials: what mindset do people come into the workplace with?
• understand the process, and
• Matching and the status of artisans in industry and how do we change that status?
• to build some confidence in the strategy process
• Career progression and advancement
• South Africa is ‘flooded’ with partially-qualified and poor quality artisans, doing the work
without proper qualifications.
• Industry coordination, both across all industries and within the plumbing industry
• What the skills gap means, and whether it is a quality or quantity gap
The opportunities:
• 4th Industrial revolution - 4IR
• Apprenticeship management
• Soft skills and soft-skills training
• Entrepreneurship training, and
• Innovative learning
This was research done by BluLever prior to the plumbing industry intervention, which now
enables it for the first time to dig deeper into the eleven issues.
www.plumbingafrica.co.za
@plumbingonline
@plumbingonline
• to build some excitement as to what is coming
• to give stakeholders the opportunity to engage
on the subject, and
• to get some clarity on who is doing what
“This gives the opportunity to align and to prioritise
projects as to what is important and where we as
an industry should be focusing. Accountability is an
important outcome of this meeting: when you have
a lot of projects running each requires accountability
– and also to know what they are being held
accountable to. This is where the process is going
in terms of creating checks and balances. Another
purpose of this workshop is to establish systematic
decision-making platforms as well as the efficient
marshalling of resources, and control thereafter.
@PlumbingAfricaOnline
March 2020 Volume 26 I Number 01