Skills shortage forces closure

Nicky Lowe

Nicky Lowe closed the doors of her award-winning screenprinting business Terrabyte at Christmas because it was too tough to find good staff.

With good tradespeople hard to find - "because everyone's going to university" - Lowe was taking what she could get, but wasn't finding the quality she wanted.

"People weren't turning up, they'd make mistakes, weren't committed to getting the job done and didn't want to work long hours.

"And they were demanding such a high hourly rate the profit on jobs was going down and we couldn't profit as a company because of it."

Despite scooping up gold medals at print industry awards here and in Australia in 2004, Lowe quit the North Shore business with 13 employees, to focus on Terrabyte's graphic design arm, where she has only three staff to worry about.

But her employment worries haven't disappeared entirely. Even within the high-skilled graphics industry it is hard to find people with good creative skills, she said.

"Most people in the graphics industry moan because we get 'Mac operators' and not designers and they're two quite different things.

"We're not getting the skills we used to get, that's for sure. I don't think they're being correctly trained with the skills that are needed in the industry."

That sees Lowe praising the work of her 60-year-old designer as "brilliant because he's got all the experience and knows what he's doing".

Lowe described the current labour shortage as "absolutely terrible" and said it had had a huge influence on her business.

"It's just really hard to find good people."