From: August issue NZ Manufacturer www.nzmanufacturer.co.nz

David O’Connor, Commercial Manager, The Learning Wave

One of the greatest challenges for any organisation is the cost and effort of onboarding a new employee .  This is further amplified in a tight job market where you may need to recruit individuals who do not have the core skills you would normally deem essential to be productive and work safely in your environment.

The need to have a pipeline of skilled and capable workers with a broad range of transferable skills, strong work ethic and the right attitude is critical to enable long term business success.

The training and educational sector have a role to play in enabling access to the right training pathways to ensure the continual development and upskilling  of the  team to prepare them for that next career step or business change.

In Manufacturing, the productivity challenge is clearly rooted in a skills deficit, with many individuals lacking the essential skills and capability needed to fully leverage modern manufacturing practices.

This skills gap has a significant impact on team work, employee engagement, safety and operational efficiency, leading to poor staff retention, low efficiency, higher error rates and  increased waste

As Manufacturing plants become increasingly technology dependent, this skill gap is unfortunately amplified and an urgent fix becomes even more essential.  Foundational digital literacy is often inaccurately assumed as a skill held by most kiwis.

According to the 2014 Survey of Adult Skills survey (PIAAC) the reality of this is that  55% of workers do not have the right level of digital competency to be successful in their roles. Meaning that over half of our workforce has low/poor Problem solving skills in technology rich work environments.

If Digital literacy is deemed critical to success, then we have to question why those who set the rules for access to workplace literacy funding continue to stipulate that digital literacy is one of the ‘other’ literacies, maintaining that access to funded training programmes is based on competency levels in reading and numeracy only.

Digital skills and digital literacy training for today’s worker is essentially the ticket to the game, and many are being turned away at the gates, or made to sit on the bench because we are not able to provide them access to the training they need.

Assuming we agree that productivity and innovation are the drivers of business growth, and growth leads to expansion, and expansion leads to the need for more people, then underpinning this is talent.

The training and educational sector in New Zealand therefore needs an ecosystem that delivers the right training programmes to businesses, fit for our modern ways of working,  rather than being constrained by the rules of a vocational education system.

If we can co-create this with the sector we can effectively prioritise access to the right skills based training, empower a digitally capable workforce, enhance our manufacturing capabilities, build talent and create successful businesses.

Unfortunately for now, we are left sitting in the dark ages while we patiently await for the system to catch up and prioritise digital skills, like they do reading and writing.