Call to action on perpetual skills shortage
It’s with equal parts amusement and frustration that I hear the doomsday merchants screaming like spoilt brats from up north that our nation’s economy is in a tailspin.
Don’t worry about the economic data that runs at a tangent to their claims, why don’t they just take a look at the lower South Island where things are ticking along at unprecedented buoyant levels?
After years of watching enviously as Auckland charged on, fuelled by house sales and migration figures, we now seem to finally be getting our turn as the true growth drivers, the producing end of the country, starts to reap tangible benefits and rewards driven off real earners like export commodities and money earned from toil and sweat.
Talk to any of our South Island heavyweights and they are all flexing their muscles, with the only real inhibiters being availability of staff and housing to accommodate them.
What a great time to be young and hitting the job market. To anyone who wants to make a disparaging remark about our young people’s ability to rise to the challenge, I counter it with the fact that in my early years as mayor and my involvement with ‘‘Ready, Steady, Work’’, I never met one young person who, when you stripped down the barriers and bigotry that were put in a young person’s way, didn’t want to work.
These are our kids, our grandkids, and it’s time we got behind them and made sure that this opportunity is not forfeited due to a lack of planning or determination to do the right thing by our own.
We are on the brink of so many marvellous opportunities unfolding. But it would be bordering on criminal to make the same mistakes as the Christchurch rebuild and procrastinate, deluding ourselves that natural market forces will prevail.
And then, once it’s too late, hit the button and bring the workforce in from overseas and lose a golden opportunity to transform the lives of so many Kiwis.
The issues have never been laid out so starkly as the presentation recently at the Dunedin Hospital workforce seminar I attended.
This is huge for the south.
With the prospect of work on our regional hospital rebuild for well in excess of 1000 people for over a decade, and while it is the biggest single employment development in the area, it’s by no means the only. Tried and tested companies like Silver Fern Farms (SFF) continue to be on the lookout for large numbers of workers.
One of my big concerns is the notion that there is an available reservoir of prospective staff in the region to fill the void. This is manifestly incorrect; we have chased that rainbow for the past three years trying to fill the attimes up to 1000 vacant jobs in the Clutha District. That well has been drained.
Another option put forward was the possibility of attracting the approximately 400 workers who commute from Dunedin to work at the SFF Finegand plant in Clutha.
And I get it, people should follow their hearts and make their own decisions about what is best for themselves and their families.
But this isn’t solving the wider issues, only deflecting the problems on to your neighbour.
Right now companies need to be grabbing all prospective employees and training them up to be ready for the surge.
But no more telling a comment was made at the seminar than from the head of a major construction company, and it was all around risk.
Why would a company take on 30 or 40 apprentices now and train them up, so that they can run the gauntlet of not winning any of the work?
Or having opposition companies pilfer the staff once training is complete?
You would have to be thick to think a company was going to run this risk. Has the Government got the courage or foresight to see the problem for what it is and pick up the challenge?
As a nation we have to carry that risk so we can reap the longterm rewards. We need to work in tandem with the construction companies, never losing sight of finally addressing New Zealand’s perpetual skills shortage.
For years we have been subjected to rural decline and a fixation on Auckland, now that we have the chance to come out of the quagmire swinging like Tyson. Let’s also show that we can do it with a bit of initiative and compassion, that the south will look after its own and do the right thing by New Zealand.
One of the fun things about being a parent of schoolkids was picking out all the grammatical and spelling errors in letters home from school.
So the first thing I noticed about a whiteboard message left by Florida school teacher Diane Tirado, after she was sacked, was that she had capitalised the words ‘‘kids’’ and ‘‘for’’ incorrectly.
Just to bring you up with the play, Tirado made international headlines this week when she was fired for refusing to give a pass grade to children who had not even handed in their assignments.
Her case will add fuel to the debate about the snowflake generation.
It’s a word you often hear applied to more recent generations of our species who, it is said, cannot cope with the reality of life.
So harsh comments or rebukes are met with protests and demands for apologies and safe places and heads to roll.
This week threw up a more local case study in remarks made by principal Virginia Crawford of Hamilton’s Fraser High, who told students that not turning up for classes or school made it more likely they would end up in prison, a rape victim, dead at their own hand or essentially a no-hoper. Some students protested and some parents were appalled.
Given that teenagers ignore most of what adults say anyway, it’s puzzling that people should think Crawford has somehow damaged her fragile students.
Although we can quibble about Crawford’s approach and rather long bow, her message would have found a very sympathetic audience among the general public, who tend to have a more straightforward view on these matters than politically correct academics and liberal social commentators.
I’m mostly on Crawford’s side. A healthy reminder of how failure at school narrows choices down the road can’t hurt, and why she should be pilloried for trying to instil a few home truths is beyond me.
Her crystal ball exercise is backed by a plethora of research that means a person’s future can be predicted with frightening accuracy.
The real issue, of course, is why people disengage from education in the first place. There are multiple reasons, the least of which relate to syllabus or teachers. As they say, education begins in the home.
Most middle-class columnists like me did not struggle at school, thanks to a stable home life and a reasonable amount of innate ability, but I was reminded recently how struggling students must feel every day and why the learning part of school life must be a nightmare.
I was doing a training session for editing video on iPhones, a skill all reporters should now have. The trainer raced through the basics as though it was second nature.
Some obviously found it useful but I had switched off after about 10 minutes. When the next course came along with the same instructor, I bunked the class and went for a nice walk.
It struck me at the time that every school day must be like that for a lot of kids. Obviously people learn at different rates and some, like me, are slow learners. It’s also true that hard work, determination and application will overcome most of these difficulties in time.
Your character is your fate, after all. But what if every day at school is hard work and your character is constantly tested?
It becomes very easy to see how kids disengage from learning and, combined with deadbeat parents, useless mates and plenty of distractions, how they set themselves on the self-destructive path that Crawford was railing against.
So what do we do? I understand the argument that telling people they are useless is not particularly effective in encouraging achievement.
But making too many allowances to avoid damaging delicate psyches is also not the answer, and neither is an attack on someone like Crawford, who knows a lot more about problems at the coalface than most.
We also need to stop overestimating what our schools can do and stop expecting teachers to fill in the gaps left by bad parenting. Clearly the key to people learning even the basics at school is engagement, and no effort should be spared to ensure that the bottom 30 per cent are kept in the system.
If your family is a disaster, school is often the only chance for a better life.
The idea that schools should instil in every attendee a feeling they have wonderful, unique abilities that society needs to recognise and celebrate is wellintentioned but ultimately futile.
One of the key messages that people need to get at school is that one day they will have to make a living and put food on the table.
And if they can’t make a living, they should get ready for a life of dependency and limited choices.
Proverbs 12:25