Anele Magwentshu says stepping into the role of Director for Institutional Planning at CPUT is his ideal position because all of his new responsibilities encompass roles he has undertaken at various institutions over the years.
“In the past I worked in a similar unit but I have never before been given the opportunity to actually lead and execute the tasks,” he explained.
Magwentshu’s position spans strategic, academic and enrolment planning and involves institutional research and data management which covers issues of ensuring data quality and integrity.
While it calls for a broad overview of how CPUT functions, Magwentshu originally started as one of the most integral cogs of an educational institution, first as a student and then lecturer.
He originally obtained his ND Business Information Systems at the former Eastern Cape Technikon and then did his BTech at the former Port Elizabeth Technikon.
After he obtained his Masters at the Tshwane University of Technology he started lecturing Information Technology at that institution.
He soon moved into a more administrative role as a systems administrator: “I was also responsible for some reporting for departments like human resources and finance and that is really what exposed me to institutional planning and how all these things fit into each other.”
Excelling at the reporting Magwentshu was recruited into their institutional planning department but eventually wanted more experience and moved on to Welkom in the Free State to Central University of Technology.
“The goal was to experiment and see how the confidence I had at the time would work in a different environment.”
“What I had to do there was establish systems, because not all systems were in place as I anticipated before I joined them. That made me grow from what I thought I had accumulated in terms of experience from the Eastern Cape,” Magwentshu remembered.
Moving to Gauteng to work at the University of Witwatersrand introduced him to a much faster pace of life and a work culture where boundaries of rank were blurred for a synergistic work environment.
“The culture of Gauteng itself requires one to deliver. You cannot be there and think you can sit and chill and watch other people working.”
Now that Magwentshu has started at CPUT he wants to take all of these lessons and apply it in what he thinks is a very exciting time as Vision 2020 is wound up and the institution starts planning its vision for the next decade.
Written by Theresa Smith
