AECOM's Kim Timm wins Mentor of the Year

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The annual CESA Aon Engineering Excellence Awards recognises the contribution of young professionals to the engineering profession, and related initiatives to transform and sustain the future, including the critical role played by mentoring and job shadowing.

Timm has a BSc Eng (Civ) from the University of Cape Town and a MSc Eng (Civ) from the University of Stellenbosch. Describing herself as an all-rounder, she has worked on both heavy and light industrial, retail, commercial, and residential projects. “I enjoy the size and diversity of the projects, and the teams we get to work with.”

A recent flagship project for Timm was the challenging dolomitic ground conditions at the site of the new Lakeside head office in Centurion, Pretoria for resources company Exxaro. Here AECOM collaborated closely with AMA Architects to optimise the building design.

Mentoring 4 Success

In order to ensure that valuable skills and experience are passed onto the next generation, AECOM has partnered with Mentoring 4 Success to introduce two new mentoring apps. These are Knowledge Mentor and Mentor Excellerator, with the latter introduced at the end of July.

Mentoring 4 Success has an exclusive relationship with the Knowledge Mentoring Institute (KMI), which develops disruptive knowledge-sharing and professional career acceleration apps and supporting technologies; owner Shelley Marsh explains. "We have also partnered with the South African Board of People Practice, whereby human resources (HR) practitioners can obtain qualifications based on their particular HR background. AECOM is the first company of its kind locally to afford engineers a professional HR designation in terms of their mentoring role."

"From an AECOM perspective, we are constantly looking to improve the way we do things, and we do acknowledge that our young talent needs mentorship," comments Jill Singh, HR business partner. "Many companies believe in external training that is aligned with all the different policies and government procedures, but we have realised that mentorship is key."