Rural expos, taster camps for jobless
A southern group has developed a strategy aimed at getting the unemployed interested in a career in agriculture.
The Southern Rural Workforce Action Group, which was formed to address workforce shortages in the agricultural sector, plans to work alongside the Southern Institute of Technology.
Its strategy includes running expos in Queenstown and Te Anau, three-day taster camps, a six-week training programme in agriculture contracting and a three-week dairy familiarisation programme run by DairyNZ.
Group member Bernadette Hunt, who is also Federated Farmers’ Southland vice-president, said the group had changed its action plan because of the economic effects of Covid-19.
As a result of redundancies, for the first time in a long time there were potentially more people available to work in the agricultural sector.
However, there were still workforce challenges, she said. Some industries were reliant on migrant workers, but the likelihood of bringing them in had diminished.
A large number of the job vacancies in the sector would be skilled and would not be easily filled by people who were out of work in other industries, she said.
The action group had developed programmes to enable people to transfer from other industries.
People who had done driving work in the tourism industry might be able to transfer their skills to agriculture quickly with SIT’s six-week agriculture contractors programme, Hunt said.
SIT’s Telford campus had previously been running a three-day primary industries taster camp with high-school students that would be reframed to suit adults, she said.
The expos and taster camps are expected to start in mid to late June.
The primary industries had a wide range of jobs available and if someone was out of a job they might be surprised at what they could find here, she said.
SIT was also looking to increase the number of courses available at its Queenstown campus.