In a personal reflection, Dr Raj Aseervatham FIEAust CPEng, National President of Engineers Australia, reveals key lessons from a career in engineering – and how growing up in Africa transformed his perspective on practitioners.
After some months in the role of National President and Chair at Engineers Australia, I am still taken aback, on a nearly-daily basis, by the transformative power of engineering and the sheer acceleration of technology.
I get to see a lot of engineering, routinely, that makes me feel proud and worthy of being an engineer.
I also have a deep pang of impostor syndrome most weeks, because the engineering I’ve done is – to be frank – quite mundane compared with some of the exemplary engineering I get to see in this rewarding role.
I am often asked why I studied engineering. First, I experienced its impact.
I grew up in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, where countries were gaining independence from colonial rule at an average rate of about two countries per year. I grew up mostly in Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia and Malawi. My father was a STEM teacher (before the term was invented) and had plenty of work in countries that were effectively reinventing their educational system.
There was also systemic under-investment in basic engineering infrastructure in those countries. Some of the smaller towns and villages we lived in had little or intermittent access to running water and electricity. I remember one particular town we lived in, a tiny place called Mkushi, where we had electricity from 5:00 to 8:00, courtesy of a diesel generator. I would have to cram all after-school activities, including dinner and homework, before lights went out and things got decidedly harder via a kerosene lamp.
Witnessing heroes
After some months of this, we received news that power lines were coming to town. I noticed the construction that heralded reticulated energy: the towers along the horizon. I asked my father who they were – these people on the hill with their machinery – and he responded with one word: “engineers”. Three months later I was doing my homework at 9:30 without light-induced anxiety. The days were longer; time was now elastic. Six months later, we were watching McEnroe and Borg play Wimbledon, a hemisphere away.
I was seven and flushing toilets were still a novelty, so this was a notable step change for me. From squinting at my times tables 10 inches away in the semi-dark to experiencing tennis combat, live, on the other side of the planet in glorious black-and-white, this felt life-transforming.
I started noticing bridges that halved our travel time between towns, and our ability to traverse space and put communications satellites out there. I felt the awe of watching an image of my youngest brother moving in my mother’s tummy, long before he appeared in my physical world. To me, at the time, the world was literally galloping through technological marvels.
Secondly, I saw heroes in the field. I had two uncles and an aunt in England who were various species of engineer. They were all individuals I admired – they seemed well put together, thoughtful, capable of thinking that solved rather than anguished in problems (even the everyday ones), and quietly confident of this capability. I could aspire to be them.
My parents had a strong preference that I study medicine, and they were not shy about expressing themselves. Still, in my mind’s ledger, the prospect of making a difference to 1000s, or 100s of 1000s, of lives in each project outweighed the cumulative impact of one patient at a time. Perhaps I was just lazy, or just an efficiency snob, or perhaps I was just undervaluing what doctors do. I have a surgeon brother who guarantees the latter – but, then, he would say that, wouldn’t he?
Natural progression
So I slipped almost naturally into engineering studies.
I practiced most of my engineering in large infrastructure, first in water and then in mining and energy. As I honed my engineering through practice as well as postgraduate studies, I realised that I was rarely dealing with small-value issues. Capital budgets were typically in the 100s of millions or billions of dollars. Operational budgets rarely chipped more than a zero or two off the tail of the capital budget.
The combination of the best technical and cost-effective solutions to problems defined the engineering sweet spot for many projects. I studied an MBA, focusing on capital allocation, risk and finance, to better arm me to find those sweet spots. My engineering universe doubled in size as I understood more about the money, and my career expanded with it.
As I developed my practice more, much of it in high-capital, cost-enabling infrastructure for mining and energy projects around the world, I discovered a third dimension of value. Bringing those engineering concepts to life in a way that honoured our environment and communities – with lowest disruption and the avoidance or minimisation of unintended consequences – underpinned true positive legacies.
Today, they call it ESG. Twenty years ago, it added another large dimension to my engineering.
And while it doesn’t seem very imaginative given that this is just my own experience I draw upon, I have three small pieces of advice for prospective or early-career engineers:
- Do your engineering well because you can change lives, sometimes at large scale.
- Understand and manage financial decisions, because engineered things at large scale – whether building one big thing or manufacturing a million small things – involve large investments.
- Understand and manage impacts, because your finest legacy may well be the engineered outcome that places people and their environment high on your hierarchy of engineering needs.
It occurs to me that these mindsets fit just as well for my own humble civil, mining and energy engineering history as they do for some of the powerful and visionary engineering of tomorrow.
