Scared of NZ ‘getting left behind’
New Zealand needs to be ready when the rest of the world opens for business again, four-day working week advocate Charlotte Lockhart
If you have made a spelling mistake in a job application, you had better hope it is not Dunedin City Council chief executive Sandy Graham who is looking at it.
Graham, who recently went through the job interview process herself for the council’s top job, looks for integrity, adaptability and authenticity when she is considering new employees for senior roles.
She also prioritises people who can write and communicate well, although she makes the odd exception for a standout candidate.
‘‘Being able to write a decent sentence seriously helps. I will not interview someone if there is a spelling mistake in their job application, because I think if you cannot get that level of detail right it speaks to something.’’
People do not realise how broad their skills are, she says, and adaptable people are an advantage to organisations having to make do with less money in a Covid-19 world.
Graham advises people – in particular women – not to undersell themselves in a job interview and to be authentic.
When she is interviewing people, she likes to have a conversation on top of the standard questions, giving them a chance to be at their best.
When recruiting, Graham always wants to do the final interview face to face. There is something that you miss in remote interviews that you just cannot quantify, she says.
The final stage in her own fourstep job interview process was in front of the mayor and 14 councillors.
‘‘I did my mihi for the very first time at my final job interview and that was the most nerve-racking part. ‘‘That was about being authentic. ‘‘I knew it was something I wanted to develop on the council, a better commitment to our Treaty obligations, and so I thought best start at the most important hour-anda-half of my life.’’
‘New Zealand is not keeping up’
Charlotte Lockhart, chief executive of the 4-Day Week Global Foundation, says New Zealand needs to be ready when the rest of the world opens for business again.
The country has been protected from much of the Covid-19 fallout but for places like the United States and United Kingdom, ‘‘Covid is sharp and real, they are at the pointy end of it.
‘‘The rest of the world – and I don’t think New Zealanders fully appreciate this – their new normal is going to look very different to ours.’’
In the UK, where she is based for part of the year, people were still working from home as much as possible and the virus affected people in their daily lives all the time.
‘‘Out of adversity comes innovation and we do not have the level of adversity that the rest of the world has,’’ she said.
‘‘I am very scared about New Zealand getting left behind, very scared.’’ If New Zealand does not upskill its workers and improve its productivity, it will be left behind once borders begin to open, and the current brain gain of highly skilled expats will be very temporary.
Many other countries will see their levels of Covid drop when vaccines become more available.
On the other hand, if New Zealand wants to join the rest of the world as it reopens, it will inevitably see coronavirus levels rise.
‘‘The vaccine puts Covid into New Zealand. So how do we prepare our workforce for that? Those answers are all being decided overseas ... New Zealand is not keeping up and I worry about that.’’
For example there will be fewer remote meetings, which are used heavily in countries ravaged by coronavirus. But once borders open up, investors will not want to invest via Zoom and if Kiwis are not physically at the table, they will miss out, Lockhart said.
‘Nothing has happened the way we expected it to’
Trade Me head of jobs Jeremy Wade says the top-paying and lowestpaying jobs will not change next year. For years, the top three jobs on Trade Me have been tech-related roles, the most senior being architects. At the lowest-paid end are hospitality and tourism, housekeeping and kitchen staff.
Amassive spike after Covid in applications for each job listing has flattened out and listings have picked up, says Wade.
‘‘Nothing has happened the way we expected it to so far. If you had asked me back in June, Iwould have said we are in for a recession which is going to last at least until June 2021, potentially longer, and with that we should expect high levels of unemployment and obviously a lot of people applying for jobs.’’
There would be wage rises in categories where employers were
really struggling to get talent, in industries like technology and construction. Wade says technology is a good area to consider for people pondering their career, not only because of the worker shortage but also because it is a skill that can be applied to different industries.
Ultimately, it is important to do a job that is interesting.
‘‘Also if you can have a peek into the future and look at, is there demand for this type of job now? If there is not now, I would be looking very carefully as to whether it is going to be in the future.’’
By late November, according to Seek, job ads were 13 per cent below a year earlier and at their highest point since the lockdown began. The fastest growing job ads by industry were in trades and services, construction, healthcare and medical, and hospitality and tourism. There were 569 jobs paying $200,000 and over on Seek, in technology, healthcare and medical, government and defence, construction, and for chief executives and general managers.
The future of work is already here
Mike Burrell, executive director at the Sustainable Business Council of New Zealand, says the level 3 and 4 lockdown gave hints about the future of work.
Many office workers worked from home but it was not as simple for people in services and manufacturing.
‘‘Economic disruption disproportionately affected the most vulnerable. If you are middle class, working in a job with a laptop, probably you have done OK,’’ Burrell says.
It was important to take a deeper look at flexibility in sectors where that was harder to achieve and that was where technology stepped in, for example remote manufacturing.
An encouraging sign was the number of companies doing the right thing and engaging with employees, driven in part by not wanting to risk their reputations.
‘‘This is not like the 1980s where a whole lot of people were thrown into redundancy and basically it was left up to the government to put them on the dole and then find jobs.’’
Flexible working, and working from home at least some of the time, is here to stay, he says. A focus on wellbeing would also remain, with companies worried about burnout and social isolation among their staff.
Companies were pleasantly surprised at how quickly they could change but they had to keep looking through the immediate crisis for opportunities ahead.
New Zealand’s boards of directors expect to be dealing with many of 2020’s challenges into next year, says Felicity Caird of the Institute of Directors.
She says the focus on mental health and wellbeing will grow.
‘‘There is a recognition that this year there has been a lot of stress for workers, not just being in the lockdown period but around job security and the changing nature of jobs.’’
More board time was spent on how to tackle risk but directors were also confident about opportunities and improving performance.
Work has changed significantly and it will not go back, she says.
But to make the most of the disruption, workers have to be supported and upskilled.
NZ Council of Trade Unions (CTU) president Richard Wagstaff says the overall impact on the economy has not been as dramatic as expected, despite upheaval and hardship for people in industries like tourism.
New Zealand’s reliance on foreign migrant labour and, in some industries, its exploitation of that labour has been highlighted by the closed borders, Wagstaff says.
‘‘I think you are seeing that in industries like horticulture and agriculture ... they have developed a reputation for not being good places to work, and have developed a reputation for being quite exploitative and disrespectful, and I think those chickens are coming home to roost for those industries.’’
The CTU hopes the Government will lead the New Zealand economy away from low value, high carbon industries to invest in better use of technology, higher skills and better productivity.
The Government’s ‘‘Reform of Vocational Education’’, restructuring trades training, is ambitious and it remains to be seen whether it will plug the skills gap, Wagstaff says.
‘‘I think we need a planned, deliberate strategy as a nation to build good work and sustainable industries in the medium to longer term. Our expectations about the longer-term future of work is jobs that require emotional intelligence and hands-on care cannot easily be done by a machine, andwe expect that they have a long-term future.
‘‘Jobs that are associated with oil and carbon might not be so secure but emerging jobs that are using other technologies, be it alternatives to plastic, or different energies, are likely to have a good future.’’
Pay is improving in some industries following a $2 billion jolt from the Government’s pay equity package in 2017.
The real movers next in terms of pay would be areas of historically undervalued work done by women, in education, in the public sector, clerical work, administrative work, he says. Security guards and cleaners may also benefit from fair pay agreements in the next few years.
Bill Rosenberg, CTU economist and member of the Productivity Commission, says that despite the uptick in unemployment to 5.3 per cent, there have been no huge job losses yet.
‘‘For many people it means that this will be a really great time to stay at school or to get more tertiary education, including not just university but trades training and other vocational training.’’
He wants the Government to stick to its policy of being ‘‘quite stingy’’ in the immigration it allows.
‘‘It does mean that people need to have the right skills andwe should be taking advantage of this so people get the opportunity to get those skills.
‘‘It also requires employers to stand up and take an active role in helping prospective and actual employees get trained and to up their skills, and facing up to reality, if you like,’’ Rosenberg says.
‘‘It is a big ask and it is trying to do things that should really have been done over a longer period but it is one that all employers are facing so from that point of view they are not losing a competitive advantage by [investing in staff].’’