Labour market gaps frustrate employers

Gaps in the Hawke's Bay employment market are unlikely to be filled for years, leaving companies with a frustrating wait for people to complete training with the right skills, an expert says.

Skilled job vacancies advertised on Seek and Trade Me in Gisborne/Hawke's Bay had the third highest regional increase in the country - up 14.5 per cent year ending August, according to a Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment report.

Employers and Manufacturers Association spokesman Gilbert Peterson said recruitment difficulties stemmed from a gap between skills required for jobs and skills actually being developed.

"Larger companies are investing in skills training but smaller companies tend not to be able afford to do that," he said.

"There's a tight labour market and lots of people understand the need to upskill, but the demand for skills keeps getting ahead of them."

Trades academies had had good results but it would be a while before there was a steady stream of graduates, because the process was fairly new, Mr Peterson said.

"The timelag of people not trained in enough skills could go on for years."

Pipline Recruitment Napier director Ian Beattie said the employment situation was a mixed bag, with large numbers of applications for some positions and very few for others.

"We have huge numbers of applicants for low-level accounting, customer service and administration roles," he said. "The harder to recruit ones, where there are genuine skill shortages, tend to be quite specialised."

The Canterbury rebuild and need to do seismic assessments and remedial strengthening work around the country had led to a massive engineering skill shortage, particularly in structural engineering, Mr Beattie said.

Engineering firms often had to look overseas to find the talent they wanted, he said.

System administrators, programmers, web developers and other roles in the IT sector were also hard to fill, as were high-level accounting and finance positions, he said.

Mr Beattie believed the skill shortages would take 5-10 years to correct. The younger generation were IT savvy, engineering cadetships were becoming increasingly popular, and universities were taking on large numbers of students to fill the IT and engineering sectors, he said.

Statistics New Zealand's 2014 business operations survey of 36,000 businesses found 31 per cent were reporting vacancies that were hard to fill, particularly for tradespeople. The trend has been rising since 2009.

Only 51 per cent of the firms considered all their staff to have all the skills required to do their jobs, and for tradespeople the proportion fell to 44 per cent.

Forestry, machinery manufacturing, construction, telecommunications and computer systems design were the industries with the highest levels of hard-to-fill vacancies - all above 40 per cent.

When asked what actions they had taken as a result, 39 per cent of the businesses which reported hard-to-fill vacancies said they increased salaries, 35 per cent trained less qualified recruits, 26 per cent used contractors, 23 per cent recruited overseas and 29 per cent stepped up training.

Trade Me Jobs data for July-September showed employment growth in almost every region. In Napier, job listings were up 10 per cent compared with the same period last year with 457 listings, while listings in Hastings were up 22 per cent at 482.

Hospitality and retail were Napier's biggest movers, while healthcare and transport were highlighted as the biggest drivers of growth in Hastings.APNZ