Building a sustainable engineering pipeline: ECSA–academic collaboration on reducing attrition

The engineering profession is central to South Africa’s innovation, however, persistently high attrition rates within the skills pipeline threaten the sustainability of the engineering workforce. This study aimed to address high attrition rates in the engineering profession. A mixed-methods research design was used, and data were collected through qualitative surveys and questionnaires. The study included n = 10 purposively sampled academic staff and n = 263 registered engineering candidates sampled using simple random sampling. The qualitative data was analysed using thematic analysis, while the quantitative data was analysed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. The study identified foundational gaps in basic education, institutional barriers, and language proficiency as contributors to attrition. Significant differences were found in perceptions of academic workload across candidate categories (H = 21.006, p < 0.001), with Candidate Engineers reporting the greatest difficulty (Mean Rank= 110.26). While no statistically significant differences were observed for financial-related items among the Candidate Engineers (p > 0.05), 80% of lecturers cited financial challenges as a key contributor to attrition. Qualitative insights highlighted that 70% of lecturers identified foundational gaps in mathematics and science, and 60% raised language proficiency as a barrier. The study recommends enhanced collaboration between ECSA and higher education institutions to foster a more sustainable engineering pipeline.