Don’t need a degree? Wrong
A push by businesses to persuade people they don’t need a degree to get ahead has lost some momentum, Trade Me admits.
More than 100 companies, including ASB, Fonterra, Spark, Trade Me and Xero, signed an ‘‘open letter’’ last year, declaring tertiary qualifications were not required for a range of roles within their workplaces.
Instead, the focus during recruitment would be on assessing skills, attitudes, motivation, and the adaptability of applicants, they assured prospective employees.
The companies said the ‘‘NZ Talent’’ initiative was a response to the talent shortage the country faced, particularly in the fields of technology, science, design and innovation.
Education ‘‘futurist’’ Frances Valintine, founder of The Mind Lab, which has provided digital technology courses for more than 150,000 schoolchildren and 4500 teachers, said 220 organisations subscribed to NZ Talent in the end, with the technology industry ‘‘leading the way’’.
But a special section set up on Trade Me Jobs to advertise vacancies under NZ Talent’s banner of ‘‘no qualifications required’’ was sporting fewer than 200 listings last week.
Many of those vacancies were for labourers, supermarket check-out operators and lowlevel administrators, for roles paying less than $25 an hour.
Some of the remaining vacancies advertised as ‘‘no qualifications required’’ – for example as a finance manager at Fonterra – stated that a relevant tertiary qualification would, in fact, be beneficial.
Ruth McDavitt, who sits on the advisory board of Victoria University’s School of Engineering and Computer Science and who runs the ‘‘Summer of Tech’’ internship programme for tertiary students, said she was not surprised.
‘‘I was super sceptical about it when it first came out because it did seem to be a ‘PR’ exercise,’’ she said.
‘‘I am not saying tertiary qualifications are a perfect match for what the skills might be but it is very rare for people to be work-ready for hi-tech jobs straight out of school – they do need some form of higher education.’’
Trade Me Jobs head Jeremy Wade said the company was a ‘‘little bit disappointed’’ by the number of listings.
The NZ Talent initiative relied on people volunteering their time and had been impacted by supporters changing roles and having other priorities, he said.
But he said Trade Me had not given up on it, and believed it had contributed to a useful debate.
Wade said McDavitt’s point about younger people not always being ‘‘work ready’’ was a good one.
But he was concerned school careers advice was ‘‘quite broken’’, which could contribute to people making study decisions that they later regretted.
Currently, about a fifth of fulltime university students and a quarter of polytech students fail to complete their qualifications, according to the Tertiary Education Commission.
Wade remained unconvinced that ‘‘three-year degrees’’ were where the future lay for education, arguing it might often be better for people to earn ‘‘micro-credentials’’ by undertaking small blocks of learning through their careers.
‘‘What we are talking about is just more options and people will decide for themselves what is right.’’
ASB spokeswoman Holly Ryan said NZ Talent had shown that many business leaders were ‘‘eager to inspire school leavers in navigating career options’’.
The bank had gone on to create an ‘‘online hub’’ providing school leavers with practical information on skills development, she said.
‘‘Its aim is to empower schoolleavers by giving them access to business leaders who have taken varied paths to success.’’
Victoria University computer science lecturer Simon McCallum said a Sunday StarTimes report, about a Massey University student who had found it impossible to get an internship in the supposedly indemand field of IT, had prompted debate in academic circles.
McCallum was keen to explore a new model for tertiary education that would see universities pay for some students’ education in return for perhaps 6 per cent of their earnings for a 10-year period, five years after they graduated.
Academics’ pay, above a base rate, could be tied to their students’ earnings so they also had skin in the game, with that income effectively becoming their pension plan, he said.
‘‘I personally believe in the value I add to my students, so it is the kind of risk I want to take.
‘‘The big shift that I would like to propose is to change to an ‘income share agreement’ model. How that works is instead of taking an upfront fee, we become a ‘small investor’ in the student.’’