Outstanding Mentor Award

• Paul Evans, Senior Engineer, Cardiff, United Kingdom

Paul is an experienced engineer who always has time to deal with others. He has taken it upon himself to take under his wing the graduates and cadets in the Cardiff office.

Paul's style is not to tell people how to do things but more of a coaching approach to allow the ideas to be developed by the mentee. He is respected by staff and clients alike.

• Graham Steel, Water Operations Team Leader, Albany, Western Australia

Faced with a significant challenges in 2009, in terms of unexpectedly finding replacement revenue and work for his team, Graham kept a positive attitude keeping his own and his teams morale and confidence to a very high level. He maintained a good relationship with his clients and re-established work streams from the local regional office as well.

Graham and his team assisted the other Albany office teams by taking on a project management of design and supervision projects for the City of Albany and successfully completing Land development projects for the office. In taking on these projects Graham further developed the expertise and confidence of his own team, and provided leadership to staff in the wider office through the project teams he led.

Throughout 2009, Graham’s high level of mentoring capability was central to Opus' success.

• Margaret (Peggy) Gibbs, Senior Transportation Engineer, Vancouver, Canada

Peggy is a highly experienced transportation engineering specialist with a strong reputation in Canada and USA amongst clients, partner firms and competitors.

She was the founder of a now well-established monthly lunch-time training/experience-sharing forum which is held in Vancouver and which always attracts strong attendance. As well as her own presentations at this forum she coordinates and encourages presentations by others and this provides significant benefits in familiarising younger staff with presentation skills and honing those of more seasoned staff as well as broadening knowledge generally.

Because of her approachability and deep interest in helping others she provides very constructive guidance and reinforcement to technical/professional staff as they plan and deliver core transportation projects and build their engineering and planning experience.

Peggy developed and maintains a library of photographs including good and bad examples of transportation facilities/features.  These images are extremely useful in presentations to clients, for enhancing the impact of proposals, streamlining the preparation of materials for training commissions and for instructing new staff.  These also formed the basis of a transportation category being accessible in the company’s marketing resources image bank. 

• Peter Melloy, Senior Structural Engineer, Brisbane, Australia

During Peter’s 30 years of service to the company he has displayed an extremely high level of commitment and passion for mentoring graduates. Peter has seen many new engineers join the structural team and struggle as they try to apply their education to the role of professional engineer. It is here that Peter has mentored them from a technical development perspective and has help them find their place and fit within the Company.

Despite always having his own pressing commitments that invariably demand increasing amounts of his time, Peter consistently makes time to sit with the young engineers and work through all of their issues, imparting his valuable experience. Peter’s willingness to selflessly give up his time in mentoring has assisted in improving the technical strength of Opus, helped build a culture of collaboration, and contributed to high staff retention rate.

• Chris Johnson, Work Group Manager, Christchurch, New Zealand

Chris has been instrumental to Opus' mentoring programme. He plays a very important role in mentoring, guidance and organisation of cadets.  This is not just one on one mentoring; this is the co-ordination, guidance, placement, training etc of all 10 plus Civil Engineering team cadets. 

Chris is one of Opus' original Ministry of Works cadets and has shown great energy and enthusiasm in mentoring, particularly of our newer cadetship entrants.  Chris has taken full ownership of this aspect for Opus' wider Civil Engineering Team.  Chris has ensured that the cadets are circulated to the appropriate team, that they have a one on one mentor and that their career is developing for the good of the business and for the good of their own personal development and career aspirations.  This has contributed greatly to Opus and the cadets overall development. 

Chris is a great asset to the team and has shown great empathy and drive in mentoring, particularly to give the same or better level of mentoring Chris had at the beginning of his long and successful career with Opus.