John Webster: Tertiary learning vital for wide range of skills

COMMENT

Some valid points about New Zealand's skill shortage were raised last week by Tertiary Education Commission chairman Andrew West. However, there is a danger that well-meaning attempts to persuade parents that their children should set aside their ambitions for a degree-level education may increase rather than reduce our longer-term skills deficit.

The focus should instead be on encouraging school-leavers and their parents to think beyond the traditional degree subjects, and on helping them to understand that tertiary education is not an option only immediately after completing secondary school.

Undergraduate study is no longer the realm of the professions, the sciences, or those wanting a liberal education in the arts. The workplace is rapidly changing and roles once thought of as adequately filled by technicians, highly skilled within their narrow band of expertise but with clearly defined and limited roles, now require practitioners who can think beyond their initial skill sets and adapt to change.

A good example of this is medical imaging, which is on the frontline of the skill shortages. Only a decade ago, technicians in hospital radiography departments could undertake the required range of medical imaging tasks based on a diploma-level education and some on-the-job-training.

However, with advances in technology and an increasingly complex health sector, people working in radiography departments must now be far more than competent technicians. In fact, a degree-level education, giving a grounding in the field and an understanding of the healthcare environment, from cultural issues to research and ethics, is now only the first step for medical radiation technologists.

If they wish to specialise, further education is required. Unitec offers postgraduate education in eight different specialty areas of the medical imaging field.

Dr West has singled out trades as an area towards which parents should coax their school-leaving children. He is entirely justified in pointing out that the trades are far too often seen as a pathway for those with limited options, careers for secondary-school underachievers only.

Perceptions that the trades require only modest learning capacity, and that all the necessary knowledge and skills can be acquired on the job, are simply nonsense.

Try telling that to the sparky who works with complex electronic computer and industrial control systems, or the boatbuilder grappling with propulsion and resistance.

In fact, if you factor in the impact of regulations, legislation and statutory requirements that have been imposed on the trades in the past decade, you could make a strong argument that apprenticeships should simply be one facet of a comprehensive trades-related education system.

As with medical radiation technology, the trades offer far more scope for specialisation than in the past. Like practitioners of hospital radiography, tradespeople will increasingly need an educational grounding of the kind now offered by several major tertiary institutions in order to adapt to their changing environment.

To establish their businesses and become successful entrepreneurs, self-employed tradespeople need to learn from other business models, both successful and failed, in much the same way as business students. This also requires a higher level of education than has traditionally been considered necessary for a successful trades career.

Unitec is the first institution in New Zealand to offer a degree specifically for this purpose. And it is likely that, in time, it will become accepted within the trades that tradespeople must supplement their apprenticeship training and workplace experience with some form of higher education, in order to realise their full potential.

These are just two examples of non-traditional higher education that school-leavers and their parents could be encouraged to consider.

People entering the industries that will continue to be the mainstay of our economy for the foreseeable future, such as agriculture and horticulture, can also enhance their potential contribution to, and rewards from, their fields without compromising the work-ready skills employers demand.

The kinds of degree programmes offered at institutions such as Massey, AUT and Unitec are ideally suited to the purpose. To those areas you could add New Zealand's emerging creative industries, such as design, and film and television.

While much of the recent debate has been focused on school-leavers, it is important to acknowledge that there is a growing demand from employers and employees for further education aimed at those already well-embarked on their careers.

AUT and Unitec both adopt the work-ready ethic in their degree programmes, with an emphasis on students gaining experience while they study. More than half the students at each institution are combining work with study, and most of these are working in a field related to their study.

In the tertiary landscape of the future, the education sector will continue to be driven by industry and professional needs, and continuing education will be one of the dominant themes.

* Dr John Webster is Unitec president and CEO.