Qatar rail jobs represent great opportunities for Australian engineers

The first contracts for one of the largest engineering jobs in Qatar in recent years were awarded this week and the news is a reminder to Australian engineers that rail projects in Qatar will deliver a great many engineering job opportunities.

In all US$36bn of contracts will be awarded as Qatar seeks to transform its rail infrastructure in the run up to the FIFA World Cup in 2022.

Egis Rail and Jacobs are among the early winners, taking the project management and engineering contracts for the red and gold lines. Hill will manage the third green line.

Leighton, who have the contract to build a battery operated tram system to move students around Doha Education city, are hopeful that this role will open up opportunities on the main Doha Metro.

Elsewhere in Qatar, Lusail City’s light-rail transit system is expected to be finished in August 2016

Rail forms a key element of a massive expansion in Qatar. Construction activity involves four central projects: those planned for the World Cup; the $11bn Doha Airport (in two sections from 2012 to 2015.) Thirdly, $8bn Doha Port, to be completed in 2016 for phase one, with total completion in 2030.

All this is in addition to the $25bn of rail expenditure.

Across the GCC region, rail projects are plentiful. In Saudi, Construction has begun on the first high speed passenger line between Makkah and Madinah which is expected to be complete by January 2014. New railway and expansion rail jobs currently in process in the kingdom include North-South Rail, the Land-bridge Project (between Riyadh and Jeddah), and the GCC Railway, which is set to connect the six GCC members - Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia, and Oman.

75% of Qatar’s revenues for this investment  come from it’s oil and gas sales, bolstered of late by increases in LNG exports, the revenues of which will leave the country with a comfortable budget surplus, regardless of their plans for all of this additional sustained expenditure.

All of this paints a fairly clear picture: if you’re thinking of an expat life style but you had ruled out the Middle East (based on perceptions of what it would be like to work in the region) you should take another look at Qatar.

Qatar plays host to large numbers of Commonwealth expats; and growing numbers of foreigners are working in Qatar to save money in the tax-free environment, and maintain a standard of living and wealth comparable to home. The kicker? Qatar has the highest per capita income in the world.

What’s not to like?


See immediate open Qatar Rail jobs.

Never mind Lara and the tourists, where the bloody hell are the engineers?

Lara Bingle enticed tourists to Australia in 
the famous ad

So the papers are all up in arms this week over the defection of Lara Bingle, the model who promoted Australian tourism in the famous and sometimes controversial  ‘Where the bloody hell are you?’ ad.

Lara’s talents, it seems, are for sale to the highest bidder. In this case New Zealand. Fair enough; the woman is a professional, let her take work wherever she can find it. The job market for models, like any other profession, is international.

I don’t think we’re suffering too much. Six million tourists visited our shores over the last year, a 0.5% increase on the previous year. Considering the economic state of the countries that yield a lot of our tourism dollars, we should be glad of these numbers. Especially while Europe is still frantically searching under the sofa for its lost credit card, and the Americans are on self imposed lock down.

Let’s face the fact that tourism is far less of an issue right now than encouraging the right number of high skilled migrants to move here for long term temporary assignments and fill some empty Australian engineering jobs.

Australia will become the world's biggest liquefied natural gas producer, by 2020 as it unlocks its 100 year reserves. Analysts predict it will soon overtake current leader Qatar.

Seventy percent of the world's 10 major LNG projects are under construction here and billions are being spent on infrastructure year on year.

The biggest threat to achieving this growth and all the benefits that come with it is people. We don’t have the engineering skills in the quantity we need them in house and we need to look overseas for them now. We need to look to the UK and Europe to build our engineering workforces and absorb the key skills into the Australian population in greater numbers.  

So if you see Lara, tell her to find a drawing board and a hard hat and make Australian engineering jobs sound sexy and exciting. Australia may need her yet. 

As our immigration debate rages, cooler heads look to the UK

The UK engineering media is buzzing with Australia stories. The word is out that we are the hot ticket for British workers looking for lucrative Australia engineering jobs.

Immigration remains a sensitive issue for a lot of Australians. It’s easy to understand why, given the speed at which the population is evolving. Last year’s census revealed that there are now 21.7m people in Australia, which is a 9% increase from the 2006 figures.

2011 census data shows a steep climb
in immigration

This week we’ve seen the perils of illegal immigration and the tragic risks to which people are prepared to expose themselves to get here. This is a serious discussion and it’s happening in parliament as we speak; it’s beyond my pay grade and I’ll leave it to the people best placed to resolve the many issues associated with it.

Let’s talk about a different kind of immigration; let’s talk about white collar workers, those with advanced, critical skills and where we’re going to find them.  

We all know the background. Massive increases in demand for our natural resources from fast-growing economies with substantial populations are creating tremendous urgency to develop the infrastructure that can help meet demand. We have the buyers, we have the product; the hard part is finding the engineering professionals to get the job done.

The solution lies in bringing in contract workers on long term assignments and ensuring that the skills we bring into Australia temporarily remain here permanently through training and engagement.

We’ve never had such strong opportunities to attract engineers from the UK for example. Our brand as a country of opportunity is growing there more than ever. Every economy in the world is either suffering, or recovering from, a major financial crisis. Australia, in the eyes of the technical world, is boom town.

In my years working in London, I never encountered this degree of interest coming from all areas of the UK market. It’s time to take advantage of this; it’s in the long term interests of the Australian economy. The British represent the best source of long term temporary workers we’ve got. They are one of the world’s most mobile populations in professional terms, there are no language issues and there are cultural synergies that make every stage of the process easier.

If this is not a major target for you as a recruiting organization, it needs to be. It’s a very good idea to have a specific staffing strategy right now. There’s a lot of competition for these skills and there’s a limited talent pool anyway (as there is in every area of global engineering.)

If you’re a British engineer potentially looking for an exciting foreign opportunity, you need to make sure you’ve fully considered the Australia option. There’s a chance we may really need you out here. It’s a great place to bring your family, compared to many of the more traditional expat spots, and it’s going to be a lot easier than you think to make it a reality. 






Trevor Burne is Managing Director of Talascend. He blogs about Australian engineering jobs, and issues affecting Australian Engineers.

There is no such thing as too much opportunity

How many of us have looked down a restaurant menu and complained that there were too many things to choose from? We don’t mean it. What we mean is – this is great. As long as we basically understand what we want, the choice can only empower us.

My TV has 500 channels on it – more than I could possibly watch and more than I want to surf through. But I don’t have to surf through them. I understand what each option basically represents and I can go straight to what I want, or occasionally luck into something I wasn’t expecting. If I’m shopping for a new car, I’m better off at a lot with 5,000 cars than 500. As long as I have someone to help me get to the make and model I want, at the right age and price range, I don’t have to worry about the 4,950 cars I’m not interested in, unless I see something along the way that I didn’t know I was interested in.

At no stage is the amount of choice actually a bad thing.

The debate rages on across Australia as to the best way to manage your career and find the right job opportunities. We all know engineers are in high demand and that the work is everywhere. What engineers need to ask themselves is ‘Am I getting enough choice?’

Despite the wealth of possibilities for engineers today, a lot of people are massively restricting their options by trying to manage their career choices alone. If you’re applying directly to major employers and simply waiting for a response, you’re missing opportunities every day. If you’re trying to manage your applications one by one, you’re simply not boxing clever. Find yourself a decent recruiter, and you’ll see a step change in the quantity and quality of opportunity available to you.

You’re also missing out on some important benefits. Your agent can hustle for you; they can chase down answers and expedite the hiring process. The right agent will have enough influence with their client to actually get you the job.  They can show you options you may never have considered, help you compare rates and salaries and understand where you fit.

But all of these benefits are relatively small compared to the central, overwhelming advantage: Recruiters, who live their lives in the job market making hundreds of phone calls every week and meeting with new projects and new companies every day of every week for years on end, can give you access to far more opportunity than you could ever find yourself. How many different companies did you visit last month? How many projects did you walk through? How many new hiring managers and HR professionals did you meet? Not many. And why? Because it’s not what you do. You cannot do your job and look for the next one at the same time unless you are prepared to limit yourself to a far narrower range of opportunity.

This is the biggest mistake made by professional engineers in Australia. There is help and advice available; it never costs you a dollar at any stage and the benefits are obvious. Find yourself somebody good, with a strong reputation and infrastructure behind them. The result will be more opportunity, more choice and a faster way to achieve your objectives, whatever they are. 








Trevor Burne is Managing Director of Talascend. He blogs about Australian engineering jobs, and issues affecting Australian Engineers.

High Demand and Low Supply leaves only Four Options for the Australia Job Market

It’s nice to be the centre of attention when the news is good. Australia is leading the world in job growth. Payrolls rose by just over 46,000 last month, the most since November 2010, compared with a median estimate for an increase of 10,000 in a recent Bloomberg News survey.

Full time jobs are up 12,300 in January, and part-time employment jumped 34,000. Overall participation rates – showing the number of eligible workers in gainful employment – also rose.

This growth is being driven by demand minerals and natural resources from the world’s two fastest growing economies – India and China who between them house a third of the world’s population. Bloomberg also reports that Oil & Gas salaries are up 17% to an average of $165,000 as the various developers fight to staff the eight major LNG ventures currently under construction. 

Australia now has to face the secondary challenge – filling these jobs with relevantly skilled people. Urgent vacancies and unemployed workers do not merge seamlessly to form a perfect whole. That’s not how the job market works.

We need sources of relevant workers, mostly in the engineering and technical sector - where most of these jobs came from and where most of the empty vacancies are building up.

Logically, there are four things that can happen:

1. Australian engineering jobs can be done in Australia by local workforces
2. Work can be shipped out of Australia
3. People can be shipped into Australia
4. The work can be left undone

As the world turns its eyes to Australia’s recent job market growth, we should focus our own energies on making sure the talent we need is available so that the demand is met with supply.

There is no quick fix, but there are things we have to do to build a stronger base for the future. Demand will remain high for a long time and that means opportunity for those leaving school right now to choose careers in engineering.

We also need to focus on training so that we can keep the necessary foreign skills that come into the country here, once overseas temporary workers are gone.

Right now, it’s time to bring the right people in to capitalize on the overall opportunity the growth offers.




Trevor Burne is Managing Director of Talascend. He blogs about Australian engineering jobs, and issues affecting Australian Engineers.