Professional Career

I started my professional career as a lecturer at the Vaal Triangle Technikon in 1988. My first class that I walked into was a group from Sasol, all male students that were as old (if not older) than my father. Needless to say I had to learn very quickly how not to be intimidated by more experience students.

In 1990 I started at the Potchefstroom University's Vaal Triangle campus as a lecturer (now known as the North West University (NWU). We were a small campus with great personal relations between the staff members in the faculty. I will never forget Prof Dirk Laurie's face when I suggested a weekly social in the department. 

In 1992 Derick accepted a position in Pretoria and I got a position at the University of South Africa. The distance based education environment was for me a totally new way of educating students that needed some creative moments to keep me ahead of the students. But as in any new position after a while one do not understand why everything seemed so foreign in the beginning. I was a staff member for 15 years at Unisa where I started out as a lecturer, completed my PhD under the brilliant supervision of Prof Paula Kotze and Prof Johannes Cronje, and left as a professor at the end of 2008.

In 2009 I joined the CSIR as a principal researcher within the Meraka Institute. This was a new environment where the research was mostly applied research and with a focus on funding of projects as a new focus that I was not used to. Prof Paula Kotze was the research group leader and we started a research group that focused on research within the Enterprise Architecture field. In order to be involved in supervision at universities, I was appointed as Professor Extraordinary at Unisa, NMMU, NWU and CPUT.

On 1 October 2011 I joined the University of Pretoria, Department of Informatics as the new Head of Department where I served in this position until 1 August 2016 when I was appointed as Deputy Dean, Teaching and Learning of the EBIT (Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology) Faculty.