Smart+Connected Labour and Skills Programme
The Brief: Encourage collaboration to improve Marlborough’s labour market
Skills shortages starting to bite despite efforts to address the issue
Over the past few years, Marlborough’s skills shortages have started to hurt. Vital skills and capacity shortages in health care, viticulture, winemaking, manufacturing, construction and aged care are becoming increasingly apparent, and are inhibiting the growth and development of the region’s companies and industries.
Various different initiatives have been created to address this issue. But duplication and fragmentation of effort had the effect of reducing the overall effectiveness of these interventions and often resulted in low levels of awareness on the part of Marlborough’s population and business community.
The development of the various labour and skills initiatives also highlighted weaknesses in vocational pathways offered by Marlborough’s secondary and tertiary institutions. There was pressure to create enabling opportunities for local school students, and at the same time address the skills and productivity needs of industry.
Community advocates for Marlborough District Council to foster collboration
During 2018, Marlborough District Council (MDC) began to receive an increasing number of requests for interventions that could potentially address the region’s labour and skills challenges. One of the options to do so was through the Smart+Connected programme – few other organisations have the mandate, resources or methodology necessary to pull people together around this issue.
Marlborough Smart+Connected is an economic and community development approach, designed to lead the Marlborough region into the future. It aims to catalyse volunteer effort within communities and industries, by ensuring that they are:
Smart: That we think strategically – becoming more efficient, creating new solutions, and leveraging those solutions to create new opportunities;
Connected: That we act collaboratively – staying informed, and supporting each other locally, nationally and internationally
The Council wanted to be sure that the Smart+Connected methodology could be adapted from its normal focus on a specific industry or community, to take on a issue that cuts across all industries and communities in Marlborough. So they asked Business Lab to facilitate a scoping project to validate the opportunity.
Our Approach
Scoping process to validate the opportunity
In 2018, Wine Marlborough undertook some local research on local skills shortages. This information, combined with existing New Zealand-wide research on skills shortages from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, provided a high-level picture of the situation in Marlborough.
Together with the Council and Wine Marlborough, we helped form a strong Establishment Group of key stakeholders including government agencies, industry representatives, employers and educators. Business Lab facilitated the Establishment Group meetings and helped the Group to identify 20 key people to interview.
We find interviews a valuable engagement method for two reasons:
Firstly, one can uncover much richer insights from an interview (confidential where required) than from a survey or workshop. It’s possible to ask follow-up questions and get right to the heart of an issue.
Secondly, people fell valued when you interview them. Interviewees often step into leadership positions when Smart+Connected Groups are established.
We summarised the interviews and shared this information with the Establishment Group. Based on this feedback, the Group made a unanimous decision to proceed to a full Smart+Connected programme.
After all, this was the response when we asked interviewees how important this issue was to them:
The scoping process also helped identify the wide range of organisations that hold an interest in this issue. Ultimately, this helped with the design of the rest of the engagement process.
Engagement event to identify opportunities
A strategic opportunity for the Smart+Connected Labour and Skills Group arose due to a number of central government policy changes related to employer-assisted work visas and the reform of vocational education. Through the involvement of Immigration New Zealand in the establishment process, the Group identified an opportunity to provide input to changes that were in the offing for the visa system and the setting of regional skills shortages lists. As a result, the Smart+Connected establishment process was undertaken in a manner that aligned with these policy changes.
We carried out a further 10 interviews to cover gaps identified during the scoping process, and to help promote the engagement event.
The engagement event was hosted at a packed-out hall at Marlborough Girls College, with over 120 participants drawn from local industries, the education sector, community organisations and the public sector.
The event was successful in establishing a shared agenda for the Labour and Skills programme. View a copy of the Labour and skills shared agenda HERE.
Implementation event
As part of our Engage to Act approach, we facilitated an Implementation Event three weeks after the first Engagement Event. This was open to anyone wishing to play an active role in implementing solutions related to the five shared priorities.
This event was attended by about 60 people at Marlborough Boys College. Given the importance of labour and skills issues to marlborough’s young people, special emphasis was placed on attendance by students from both the Boys and Girls Colleges.
Attendees convened around the priorities of most interest to them, and developed project ideas on how to respond to those priorities.
Following these two events, the Establishment Group reconvened to consider the outcomes achieved, and confirm the membership of the Steering Group, which will oversee the formation of Working Groups and the implementation of work programmes.
The Result: A strong collaborative group working on opportunities together
We view engagement as a recruitment process to identify the best people to lead a programme of work. In this case, Vance Kerslake, Advocacy Manager for Wine Marlborough, stepped up as the Chair of the Steering Group, supported by a strong group of regional peers.
Six months on, the Labour and Skills Steering Group and Working Groups continue to work actively on their priorities. The Employers’ Working Group has successfully partnered with the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) on a new pilot to help jobseekers transition into permanent employment.
Partly as a result of a Smart+Connected Labour and Skills submission on Employer-Assisted Work Visas and Regional Workforce Planning, Marlborough has been recognised by Immigration New Zealand (INZ) as a region in its own right for the purposes of regional labour force planning, as opposed to being considered as part of a broader Upper South Island region. This is particularly significant due to Marlborough’s unique labour market characteristics, which are often not apparent from consolidated data for the Upper South Island.
Marlborough is well placed to benefit from further changes the government is proposing to address labour and skills shortages. These proposals include the creation of Regional Skills Hubs, which can provides an accurate picture of skills shortages for each region. Having a strong Smart+Connected Labour and Skills Group gives Marlborough a significant head start in implementing such initiatives.