OVER A DECADE AT WISA

What does WISA mean to you?

MC I regard my WISA colleagues and the members I have interacted with over the years as family. I feel privileged to be a part of the water sector, even though it may only be in a small way.

Why should water and sanitation professionals join WISA?

WISA provides water professionals with a network of like-minded individuals, people who are all passionate about making a difference in the sector and ensuring that our most precious finite training opportunities where registered professionals can earn their required CPD points. WISA ensures all courses and events have triple accreditation, through ECSA, SACNASP and WISA. This means that registered professional engineers, scientists and process controllers can claim our CPD points. We also have some great membership benefits – from our free vacancy listings for company members, to our tender database and online library, which holds past conference papers and webinar recordings that can be accessed anytime.

How do strategic partnerships benefit WISA members?

Strategic partnerships are really important to WISA. WISA is a voluntary association, and we greatly rely on our partnerships with other associations, both voluntary and statutory, to be able to reach all corners of the water sector. It also enables us to be able to provide more benefits to our members, as well as ensuring that our partners receive benefits either through access to our members or through WISA’s growing reputation within government, SOEs and the sector.

What sets WISA apart from other training providers?

WISA training has really grown in the last few years. Looking at any other professional body, it is clear that training is an integral part of their operations, and we realised that not only is it an opportunity that we are missing but we owe it to our members, and the sector, to ensure that water sector professionals have access to credible accredited CPD training.

WISA has a Quality Assurance Committee in place that evaluates all training courses before putting them out in the market. We are always striving to improve our training courses and course offerings; in order to do this, we need members with the required knowledge and expertise to join WISA as training providers. In addition to this, we need organisations in the sector to acknowledge WISA training as highly credible and to ensure WISA is registered as their preferred training provider. Through this, we can slowly but surely clean up training in the water sector and weed out fly-by-night training companies.

What training courses do you currently offer?

WISA currently has a number of training courses available. Many are hosted online, some in person and we have some e-learning courses that you can also access and complete in your own time, at your own pace and still earn your CPD point.

We have different courses, aimed at different skill levels and different positions in an organisation. Our technical courses include: Water Governance, presented by Carin Bosman; Sustainable Operation and Maintenance of Small Water Treatment Plants, presented by

Chris Swartz; and various Wastewater and Water Treatment courses presented by Dewald van Staden. Dewald also hosts a course on the Introduction to Water and Wastewater, which is specifically aimed at people who are new to the sector and perhaps work in sales, marketing or even finance, so that they can also get an understanding of the water and wastewater treatment processes, which may assist them in being able to do their jobs better. Some of our soft-skills courses include Leading Yourself, presented by Professor Hamanth Kasan, a stalwart of the sector; we also have the ever-popular Fundamentals of Modern Leadership, hosted by Zifundise Training, which specialises in various soft and administrative skills training. These presenters are all longstanding members of WISA, whose reputations as experts in the sector precede them.