Amal Doorgapershad | Knight Piésold

Amal Doorgapershad

Knight Piésold

Amal Doorgapershad is a professional civil engineer with over 25 years of experience in the planning and design of bulk water supply infrastructure. Throughout his career, he has mentored candidate professionals under his supervision and has been instrumental in creating an environment within Knight Piésold’s KwaZulu-Natal branch, as regional manager, that promotes tutelage and knowledge-sharing.

Most recently, three of his candidates have successfully obtained their professional registration with ECSA within the past two years.

Amal believes that a mentor has tremendous responsibility in the development of young engineering professionals, particularly for graduates entering the industry. Aside from sharing his technical knowledge with his mentees, he also seeks to uphold the dignity and ethics of the engineering profession and leads by example.

He recognises that a blanket approach to mentorship cannot be applied and therefore ensures that he acquaints himself with candidates on a one-on-one level and seeks to understand them, their interests and personalities in order to tailor his mentorship strategy to each of the candidate’s needs.

When scheduling work activities for mentees, Amal assigns tasks to ensure that the mentees are given ample opportunity to constantly improve their engineering judgement by exposing them to tasks of increasing responsibility throughout their candidacy. He emphasises the need for a holistic approach, since registered professionals need to be capable of making decisions that address all aspects of a problem, not just the technical components.

Under his guidance, candidates have had opportunities to work on some of the largest steel pipeline projects in KwaZulu-Natal, including the preliminary design, detail design and construction monitoring of: • Western Aqueduct Phase 1 for Umgeni

Water – diameters up to 1 600 mm • Western Aqueduct Phase 2 for eThekwini Municipality – diameters up to 1 400 mm • Northern Aqueduct for eThekwini

Municipality – diameters up to 100 mm • North-South Carrier Phase 2.3 for

Water Utilities Corporation (Botswana). Most recently, candidates have been afforded opportunities to work on largescale, cross-border water projects such as the Lesotho-to-Botswana Water Transfer Pre-feasibility Study and the Lomahasha Namaacha Water Supply project between Eswatini and Mozambique.

Amal encourages young engineering professionals to learn as much as possible about the management aspects of engineering. Aside from management of projects in terms of resourcing and budget planning and monitoring, the mentees are always asked to consider the risks associated with the designs and decisions.