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.

The biggest mistake made in meetings...

Everyone’s an expert.

Do you ever notice that? When you’re sat in meetings on more or less any subject, the people sat round the table always seem to have plenty of opinions, often expressed with the certainty of fact, but very few have a lot of questions to ask.

I wonder why that is. In all circumstances in life where groups of people are trying collectively to reach a correct decision, the process is always question and answer based. Courtroom trials are based exclusively on questions and answers, as are committee hearings, enquiries and tribunals.

Asking questions is not just a practical necessity, it’s also a basic human courtesy. It’s the foundation of human interaction, for strangers as much as for old friends.

Do you come here often? What team do you support?  How are Mary and the kids?

Virtually all conversations are question and answer led, until you’re in a meeting room with eight of your colleagues. Then suddenly everyone seems far more interested in asserting their own opinion than they are in soliciting someone else’s.

Why do we indulge this? The most awful people we meet socially are those who never ask questions. You know the type. You’re at the pub and every time a line of conversation emerges, this person can only reference it in some way back to themselves. They are not interested in taking in, only in giving out.

“I’m very excited, I’m going to Tunisia next month.”

“I went to Tunisia last year.”

“I just got a text from my friend, she’s living in London at the moment.”

“When I was living in London I found the weather was just too much.”  

It’s easy to do. Relating things back to personal experience is natural, but it’s also intrinsically selfish and a real social turn off. How much better is it to ask questions? Imagine if the same person answered each statement with a question…

“I’m very excited, I’m going to Tunisia next month.”

“Really? Why did you choose Tunisia?”

“I just got a text from my friend, she’s living in London at the moment.”

“Where abouts is she staying?”

A person who asks questions is immediately more likable and will ultimately accomplish more. Asking questions makes the person you’re talking to feel like you’re interested and it gives you more information. When it comes to business, information is almost always useful in making progress and problem solving.

We all need to ask more questions and listen to the answers. There is a danger that you're asking less questions than you actually think you are. Paying close attention to how you behave, and whether you're a listener or a talker is very important. As an old poker-playing friend of mine says, if you look round the table and you can't see who the loser is, then it's you.

What do you think?




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

Your Facebook page poses professional problems right now (even without those photos.)

 

When Mark Zuckerberg updated his Facebook status from single to married this week, he probably wasn’t thinking it could affect his chances of getting his next job. And in the case of the internet billionaire, it probably won’t. But as Facebook becomes a standard tool for recruiters, even the most innocuous details could lead to missed opportunities, ethical mis-steps and ultimately legal trouble.

The amount of information we choose to publish about ourselves on the web is increasing rapidly. The uptake of sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and personal blogs is becoming more and more prevalent with a current estimation of 900 million Facebook users, 250 million Twitter users and 150 million LinkedIn users.
When individuals choose which social media they want to be a part of, do they also need to draw the distinction between business and personal social media? Is the line between them becoming blurred? The answer is yes and no.

LinkedIn profiles have always been positioned as a business networking tool, and businesses have recognised the benefits and started to publically embrace the opportunities that sit with Facebook, Twitter and Blogs through their external product and service branding strategies. So, there is a definite business connection to Linkedin but recruiters need to be careful with what potential candidates say about themselves on Facebook and Twitter as these are still highly personal domains and can cross legal implications for recruiters, for example, religious views.

What are the ethics when it comes to organisations looking at candidates social media profile? Are we saying that some media is ok and some are not? Should a user even be concerned that they may be judged on what their profiles say about them? For example, young recently married women are notoriously unpopular with small business owners who fear the disruption and expense of a pregnancy. The law is there to prevent these questions being asked at interview, but it’s not there when the owner is checking Facebook. Unscrupulous employers can sidestep the spirit of legislation, with a lot of help from the job seeker.

Research from psychological studies have started to report it is possible to make accurate judgements about individuals on the personal attributes they exhibit just by looking and analysing their Facebook profile. The content of the profile can say a lot about the individual such as the photo’s displayed, the type of status updates and their likes and dislikes.

These pointers can be used as indicators on which to extrapolate and interpolate against the mainstays of identifiable qualities that make up good employees such as:

• Emotional stability
• Concienciousness
• Extroversion
• Intellectuality
• Agreeability

The Facebook profile can exhibit much information not only by the content on the page but the impression conjured by reading between the lines. It is not only what’s on the page but what’s not on the page that can bring about these additional insights.

Facebook privacy profiles are there for a reason, and must be respected by those hoping to carry out due diligence on individuals. However, a study from CareerBuilder has shown that 45% of employers admitted to looking at candidate social media during the hiring process.

Due to the popularity of the social media space, the line that divides acceptable use of social media to make judgements is inevitably going to change position over time. That said, it is very important to manage the way individual profiles are built and presented as they may be used to make value judgements about who we are and how good an employee we’d make.

It’s not just about hiding obviously sensitive material – those shots of your bachelor party in the Electric Pink Pussycat Club probably need to come down – it’s also about the details that identify aspects of your life where the law has been set up to offer you protection.







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

Hey Recruiter, Get off my Cloud.

Recruiters using Linked-in are driving me crazy. They’re flooding their profiles, and mine, with random job spam that neither targets me personally nor attempts to add value to my life. I’m ditching recruiting contacts left, right and centre because I’m so annoyed by the outright laziness of their tactics. 

It happens in so many spheres of life. If you put a coat of fresh paint on a large wall in any major city and leave it overnight, when you return in the morning it will be covered from top to bottom in posters and fliers, hawking everything from exotic dancers to cheap gold. It’s a shoddy, opportunistic approach, with no respect for the community or the potential customers that exist within it. Just jam it up there at any old angle and people will see it. It has to be better than nothing right? Wrong.

To treat an online market place like a useful fly posting spot for your random jobs is short sighted and naïve. You may get the occasional response, you may get a few, but you’re still taking a short cut that will ultimately lead you nowhere.

The currency of the Social Media market place has always been information, not distraction marketing. You have to build your audience the same way you would at a party; you have to share information, exchange ideas and build a sustainable network. That is the road to real, long term success. 

   

This week Josh Kaplan over at Talascend’s IT division talked about the growing value of Facebook as a job seeking tool. More and more people are finding employment on Facebook. According to a recent study, 18,000,000 Americans found their current job on Facebook. This is way more than Linked-In, and yet nobody posts jobs on Facebook. Instead they build networks of contacts that yield useful information through an exchange of information. Sooner or later, it leads to work.

If Recruiters continue to spam every job that crosses their desk out across Linked-in, they will decrease its value to them as a networking tool. Your customers don’t want to see every thought as it enters your head and nor do your peers and others in your industry sector, although your competitors might find it helpful to know what you’re recruiting on.

When was the last time you checked to see how many people had dropped you as a Linked-in contact? You should. And if you find it’s a great deal more than you thought, you might want to think about it before you spam your next job.

Recruiters have a critical role to play in helping people get the jobs they deserve and move their careers forward with real direction. If they think we're in it for a cheap buck, they will desert us in droves - and we will deserve it.




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