I am penning this column on the eve of my departure to New Zealand for the inauguration of the IESL overseas chapter in Auckland. This will be the 4th such overseas chapter of the institution; other existing ones being the chapters in NSW Australia, Western Australia and Qatar.

Overseas Chapters have been set up with the aim of reaching out to our globally dispersed membership enabling them to have access to membership services of the IESL.

The Chapters can provide a forum for them for social networking and for sharing of knowledge and experience among their colleagues in Sri Lanka. The members of the Chapter can also organize themselves to pass on the knowledge and experience they have gained by working in a country where there is a lot of technology transfer from developed countries like America, Europe, Japan, Australia, etc. to their fellow members in Sri Lanka who can gain much from the overseas exposure of their colleagues in overseas chapters.

The success of an overseas chapter depends greatly on the support given by its members through playing a positive role in the activities of the chapter. The NSW Chapter in Sydney was the first overseas chapter to be set up by IESL in 2009. Today, the Chapter is doing yeoman service fulfilling our expectations of an overseas chapter. It is actively engaged in membership drives and act as a bridge between the mother centre and its members in NSW Australia enabling the members there to continue to maintain professional links with the engineering community back in Sri Lanka. They have donated engineering text books last year to the engineering faculty of the Jaffna University. The Chapter also donated equipment to the library at the headquarters in Colombo . That the newly established Chapters in Perth Australia, Qatar and New Zealand too would, in time, fulfill the expectations of their members, I have no doubt. The need to establish similar chapters in other West Asian countries, Europe and America have been articulated from time to time and need to be seriously looked in to.

The movement of engineering skills around the world is part of the dynamics of global interdependence and unbalanced global development. Its sustenance is through mutual understanding among nations about the quality of such expertise and their ability to establish standards that conform to internationally recognized benchmarks. Through our membership in the Washington Accord, the benchmarked standards we establish for delivering engineering Degree programmes will ensure that our engineering graduates who have followed degree programmes accredited by us will possess attributes that will make them acceptable for work or for higher studies be they in Sri Lanka or elsewhere. Thus overseas chapters have a vital role to play in the future.

Thank you and bye until we meet again in this column of the next issue of the Digital SLEN.