-editorial, April issue NZ Manufacturer.

www.nzmanufacturer.co.nz

This from the Lead Article (Page 1) by David Downs, Chairman of the High-Tech Trust.

And now Trans-Tasman flights have resumed, we are in danger of losing people with key skills  which piles on more pressure.

Overseas fruit pickers who have been here since last year now have a way of leaving us behind and going offshore to Australia, which has suffered shortages just as we have.

This issue is addressed by Ian Walsh in his article in Business News (Page 7) “over the last few months, we’ve been made aware of the impending crisis in the horticultural sector – a crushing volume of produce languishing on the vine (or branch) due to a shortage of pickers.”

Can you imagine putting all your energy, labour, fertiliser, sprays, pruning and thinning practices over a whole year and then watching helplessly as some, or even worse, most of your crop ends up as worm food?

What an incredible waste, and yet this is what the industry has faced.

David Downs is particularly concerned for the large part of our population cut off from training and upskilling, at a time when we have a matched skills shortage of 5,000 jobs in the digital tech space, with similar shortages showing up across the advanced manufacturing sector.

Post-Covid-19 we need access to the widest set of skills we can, to transform our country and maximise the country’s potential.

D & H Steel managing director, Wayne Carson in Company Profile (Page 5) says his company had to change its recruitment model, which combined some local training with sourcing skilled staff from offshore.

The company is now even more firmly focused on its apprenticeship training programme and upskilling local people.

“It is extremely hard to find the right people, so we have to train them,” says Carson. “It’s a  five-six year process but we started about four years ago when our industry, and other industries, realised that we can’t simply rely on importing staff.

“We’ve seen the value of increasing our commitment to training apprentices and investing in our staff. So, we’re partway down that track but we still have some way to go.”

BTW…job website Seek recorded the highest number of jobs it had ever advertised in March. Ads were up by 55 per cent in March 2021 when compared to the same month last year.