The Engineering Profession Act requires the ECSA to set standards for professional competency and for education and training outcomes in engineering; ECSA committed itself to align its standard setting functions with the principles of the NQF in order to provide convergence in engineering education and training.

The Standards and Procedures unit of ECSA is specifically tasked (among others) with the management, facilitation and coordination of the following core activities:

• Development of Qualifications and Unit Standards
  ECSA, as one of its roles as an engineering education and training quality assurer established and is facilitating the Engineering Standards Generating Body (ESGB) registered by SAQA in 2000 to develop, register and maintain stage 1 and 2 engineering qualifications and standards for new categories of engineering relating to health and safety on specific requests from stakeholders such as national departments or other economic sectors.  The developed standards are then sent for registration on the National Qualifications Framework.

To search for qualifications on the SAQA searchable database visit: www.saqa.org.za 

 

• Specified Categories
  ECSA’s core business is expanding.The range of registration categories is increasing in response to requests from government departments to meet engineering-related health and safety requirements.  In consequence, an increasing range of organisations look to ECSA for assistance in areas such as standards setting, quality assurance and certification of individuals. These new developments represent a new set of activities outside the current core business.  The Council recognises that these future activities may have components in the Further Education and Training band.

This core business expansion therefore entails:

• Developing and introducing new categories of registration
• Creating a mechanism whereby registration with ECSA in a particular category is used for licencing responsible persons under various health and safety Acts.

• Standards for Professional Competency
  ECSA Council appointed a Joint Implementation Committee (JIC) with membership coming from all registration categories at ECSA including the Specified Categories.  The purpose of this committee was to ensure that the new competency standards were adopted into the registration system and the specific areas or mandate of the committee is as shown in the direct link of the S & P’s front page.