Nigerian Engineers Are Not Competent?

wots your beef with nigerian engineers ishmael, agreed nigerian engineers might be slightly incompetent 4 obvious reasons such as been taught outdated courses and not going to the field to practice. check stats when nigerian engineers go abroad they always trounce their counterparts from elsewhere. the way forward is reviewing engineering syllabus with what is obtainable globally and field involvement should also be emphasized.

where is this stats? hmm no wonder Nigerians are in high demand home and abroad 

@ALL.

 Its a big pity that our leaders are not seeing anything wrong with the moral decadence and  the great doom that has eaten deep into most professional fields in Nigeria.

Banks now get the best of all fields to work on the streets as MARKETERS.

Ask what consulting Quantity survey firms , Mechanical &Electrical engineers firms, ARCHI, etc  pay their staff!  you will be amazed. Peanuts!  meanwhile there colleagues @ banks, finance houses etc  go home with fortunes.

 Nigeria ENGINEERs  not been competent as required is not the problem of the engineers. But the problem of the GOVERNMENT and the regulating bodies.

@Ahmadtjk
Nigerian graduates are generally OK. I know if you compare what it takes to have a 2-2 in a Nigerian university to what it obtains in the world you will know

Tell naiaralanders about the company as they may want to join you at the company.

peace!

NIGERIAN ENGINEERS R BETTER THAN MANY FOREIGN ENGINEERS. THIS IS NOT BCOS I ATTENDED A FED POLY AND FED UNI, BUT I HAVE WORKED IN SOME FOREIGN ENGINEERING COMPANIES LIKE CHINESE CIVIL ENGG CONST CO @ ABUJA.  D PPLE WE CALL COMPETENT FOREIGN ENGRS ARE MERE SKILLED LABOURERS IN THEIR COUNTRIES. BESIDES, D RIGOURS WE PASS THRU 2B QUALIFIED, D STRIKES WE SURVIVED, SUCH  R SIMILAR 2 THINGS OBTAINABLE ON SITES. AS FOR BUILDING COLLAPSE, GO CHECK IT, QUARKS -NOT ENGINEERS R RESPONSIBLE!

Its not that our engineers are not competent so to say but they are lacking in some areas…… . It is a fact that our educational system is failing and the whole world knows it. No business man, in his right thinking sense, will want to employ such people to man such sensitive areas. It is not that their foreign counterpart  have seven heads or something , in fact Nigerians are one of the most intellectual people in the world however things just don’t add up for them. I work for a US based firm of engineers and I have seen them in action, the tools they use, the way they think, it’s quite different to what our engineers can do. But I must warn you - our engineers are capable of much greater things given the right training/atmosphere.

And like some contributors have rightly said ,98% of the guys that come to naija as expatriates skilled labores.Most of them only have High school education and then undergo apprenticeship .Our people need to stop seeing oyinbo people as gods because they are white.

Better we say Nigerian Technicians are competent.

@ All.

There is a clear diffrence between an engineer, a technologist, a technician and a craftmen. For the fact that some Craftmen( auotmechanic,electrician,or even welders) regard themselves as ENGINEERS doesn't make them one. There is a body COREN that regulates Engineering Profession in Nigeria and till today they renew yearly the list of registered Engineers.  So if you doubt the competency of any Engineer you can confirm with them.

@ Poster,

To answer your question,  NIGERIA ENGINEERS ARE COMPETENT.

@ishmael

Are you an engineer? Or Did you read Engineering? or are you an engineer turned banker?  Answer my questions First before i know what to say!

People like Ishmael are clueless and have the environmental perception of who an engineer is or what an engineer does
The Nigerian Engineer has been called several names; Air-conditioned engineer, Theoretical engineer,
Arm chair engineer including Coat wearing engineer. Forgetting that engineering is about the use of brain as
against 'brawl' the society (Nigerian Society) does not have regard for any intellectual or creative work.

There are damn good engineers practising in all engineering facets in Nigeria and worldwide.
If you are ignorant about who an engineer is, how would you know what he/she does?

The more you write, the more you show how little you know about engineering and the Nigerian engineers
Either you are fighting your own personal battle or you are being mischievious

N.B - Please lets make the discussion very civil and polite!

@ishmael.


Its great to here that you are a TECHNICIAN. You will need to go to a University to study Engineering follow through the modules to become a pupil Engineer. Your efforts for another 4years will qualify you to go for a COREN registration and if you are able to PASS then you become a registered Engineer in NIGERIA. That will cost you another **years .

Untill then. , You may not know What it means to be an ENGINEER in NIGERIA.  Its not  that the ENGINEERING profession is free of challenges But those challenges are the common type that affects  different areas in the Country's economy.

You are one of those Nigerians  that get inferior and freaking deceived at a white man's ability. Some of these guys i have worked with has got nothing better than you. Nigerians are all over the world doing greatly in Engineering. My brother So instead of downgrading your self to be a TECHNICIAN why not try and invent something and stop maintenace-fix or repair as you said you do.

The Government is BAD, Our Educational sector is dropping in standard everyday BUT what are we doing ourselves to improve.  ASK YOURSELF SOME QUESTIONS, Speak for yourself alone and don't say woo about Nigeria Engineers.


I

You cannot be more critical than myself about the standards of our engineering graduates.
I employ and train some.
Some are bad, so also some are very good
But do not generalize and ridicule the Nigerian engineers
Oh by the way, I am an engineer 

Now we are now reading from the same page!
This is not peculiar to the Nigerian engineers, it affects all professions including technicians
Most of the problems we (professionals) face, are systemic and environmental

@ishmael.


Try and make it simple! Tell us what you intend to do to make a NIGERIAN ENGINEER competent in your own context!

peace!

first of all like so many nigerians , ishmael does not have the first idea what engineering is about.

i am an engineer. i have worked in power , building services, and i'm currently in an oil and gas company.

i am an electrical engineer by training. i have worked on transmission upgrade projects for PHCN( when it was NEPA), facilities projects for MTN, and enginnering pojects for my current employer.

i spent a year in a leading engineering consulting firm, and i can tell you, everything oyibos do, we did in that firm. the real problems facing engineers in  nigeria are as follows

1) nigerians do not value brain work.

engineering is NOT when you see someone putting up a bridge, or laying a cable. that is construction. engineering is when you sit at your computer and agonise for hours, designing the bridge, calculating the materials , the project schedule, trying to capture all the possible issues that might come up. it is supervising the project and trying to ensure that the contractors keep to your design. it is arguments with your client, who wants to beleive that a job that costs 20million can be done for 15 million. however, for your typical nigerian, engineering is the construction worker you see working on the bridge. you visit a ttypical nigerian client with drawings, schedules, etc, and he more or less is not intersted. he thinks its all about building a bridge. he will say, what is all this paper you are showing me

2) nigerians love to cut corners.

you tell a client this will cost n20 million. he says no, do it for n15 million. you know it is not technically possible, but the man insists. even if you refuse to do the project, he will always find someone who will do it for that price, cutting corners everywhere - you specified explosion proof lights- don't worry, we can use waterproof lights instead. so many failed projects occur because a client thought he could get champagne for the price of beer

3) impositions

as an engineer, your final job is only as good as the contractor you use. but too often, the cliet has his own contractor who he imposes on you. the conractor may not even have en engineering background - his recommendation is based on his relationship with the client. so, you have an incompetent contractor who is out of your control

3) too many quacks in the industry

a sharp drafter or technicin, can pick up a lot of the jargon and some rote skills. this may be enough to prepare contract documentation that tyhe client is not trained to access. i have alraedy stated that clients don't want to spend money. you often find them employing drafters to 'design'  engineering projects. all the drafetr will do is copy and paste from engineering projects in his employers organisation. its easy to copy what you don't understand. too easy. also, a lot of engineers are guilty of the same thing, copyig designs they do not understand, and presenting them to clients.

4) remuneration
to keep up with the rest of the world is expensive. as an engineer, you have to keep retraining yourself. this adds to overhead. however, in nigeria, it is a buyers market. so many of the big companies mobil, mtn , etc, pay peanuts ( compared to fees they would pay abroad) because they can get away with it. there was actually a time when a client decide to use a foreign consultant rather than my previous employer, but they found the cost too much. they came back to us.

cerainly, engineering in nigeria has a few issues, but i believe there is very little that nigerian engineers cannot do given the OPPORTUNITIES AND RESOURCES of their western counterparts.

finally, you may not know it, but a lot of the so called expatriate engineers are often technicians/graduates of technical schools.