Abstract:
A high number of skilled engineers continue to leave the Emalahleni Local Municipality subject to a skills shortage leading to poor public service delivery in the municipality. The exodus of engineers from the municipality to the surrounding mining and steel mill industries raises a serious concern for the municipality since it cannot fully satisfy its constitutional mandate of public service delivery to the local households. It is the conviction of this study that municipalities need to develop strong and sustainable administrative capacity to retain scarce and critical skills. This is because administrative capacity has a direct impact on the skills capacity of municipal institutions. This study explores the retention strategies for engineering interns pertinent to the Emalahleni Local Municipality. This is done with the intention of determining the role of Human Resource Management (HRM) in attracting and retaining critical skills using internship programmes. Using the analysis of documents as a means of data gathering, the study presents three case studies of internship programmes from two distinct government institutions. The case studies reveals that these two government institutions have a similar policy approach to internship programmes, but there is a variance in the practical administration of the programmes. The study concludes that it is the practical administration of internship programmes and policies that determine the weaknesses and strengths of the programmes in as far as the retention of scarce skills is concerned.
