Skills shortage takes a high toll on employment

Rotorua florist Pamela Jenkins (right) spent months trying to recruit a qualified florist from within New Zealand but found Annett Reissmann in Germany. Picture / Amos Chapple

You'd think Pamela Jenkins was looking to hire a rocket scientist with experience in neurosurgery, given her difficulty in finding staff. She advertised in newspapers across New Zealand for an experienced florist to work in her store, Rotorua Florist.

"I advertised in Auckland, Tauranga, Hamilton, Rotorua, Wellington and Christchurch and I could not pick up a senior florist. I was probably like that for about three or four months. I had a horrendous problem."

Finally, she went overseas. A friend in Nelson had employed a German florist, who had a friend back home who might be interested.

She was, and Jenkins drove to Auckland to queue at the Immigration Service to get her a work permit.

Jenkins is astounded at the difficulty in finding florists. She has been in the industry for 43 years and says finding florists has never been a problem.

Samantha Surrey tells the same story, except she manages a restaurant - Auckland's Harbourside Seafood Bar and Grill - and has been advertising for two months for waiting staff.

She is not asking for the world - just someone with experience or a trainee, with good customer-service skills and a friendly manner. She is even offering full training. Yet every week she has to place the advertisement again. "We are just finding it very, very difficult to get people," she says.

She has lobbied the Immigration Service to add waiting staff and chefs to its skills shortages lists, to make it easier for immigrants with the right experience to come to New Zealand.

"We are four or five staff down on the numbers we normally have for this time of year," she says.

Surrey has been at Harbourside for almost all of its 17 years in the Ferry Building in downtown Auckland. She says there have been staff shortages before, "but this year is probably the worst year in the time I've worked here".

In another place and another trade, Jill Robinson has the same complaint. She is in Hamilton and in her industry - the motor repair trade - people have given up advertising for staff "because we all know that qualified tradesmen just aren't out there".

Robinson runs Bryant Road Panel and Motors with her husband. She has just returned from two weeks talking to structural repair centres in the central North Island - 60 in all - as part of her role as the region's delegate to the Collision Repair Association. Some reported spending thousands of dollars on advertising, without success.

A shortage of panel beaters alone will not harm New Zealand's economic growth. But almost two-thirds of New Zealand employers are experiencing difficulties finding skilled staff, according to a December survey of business opinion, published by the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research.

Labour shortages are listed as the biggest business constraint. The construction industry is the pin-up for the skills shortages - the Department of Labour says that's where shortages are most severe - but shortages are sweeping into almost every corner of New Zealand.

More than 150 occupations are listed in the Immigration Service's official skills shortage lists, including panel beaters and florists, and those are only the most severe shortages from industries whose submissions were successful. Surrey's problem with waiting staff didn't even make the cut.

The lists, drawn up to ease entry for skilled immigrants, are dominated by five sectors: engineering, farming and horticulture, information technology, health and trades.

But Bruce Goldsworthy of the Employers and Manufacturers Association says skills shortages are "virtually everywhere. So far as we can see it's almost right across the board. There will be some [industries] that will jump up and down and get noticed.

"It has been getting progressively worse over the past few years. It's just another constraint on business."

Some employers have given up complaining because it doesn't get them anywhere. "They know what to expect and they're not jumping up and down the same as they were because they've jumped up and down until they've run out of breath."

THE experiences of Jenkins, Robinson and Surrey are supported by hard facts. The most recent ANZ job index, which measures job advertisements in major New Zealand newspapers and on the internet, counted a record number of more than 50,000 advertisements in February.

It is only the second time the 50,000 mark has been passed in the index's 10-year history. The first was last November.

The bank says employers are having to re-advertise positions and cast the net wider by advertising out of their regions and using the internet.

The Department of Labour gives three reasons for the tight labour market:

* Economic growth has been sustained at high rates for five years.
* This growth has been driven by more people entering work.
* Growth in the labour supply has not kept up with this demand.

But each industry has unique factors that exacerbate the problem. Surrey says the waiter shortage is caused in part by the difficulty in recruiting people from overseas because the occupation isn't recognised by the Immigration Service as having a skills shortage.

Also, hospitality is becoming a less popular choice. Ten years ago, the industry had fewer restaurants yet more high-calibre, ambitious career waiters were seeking work.

"A lot of people don't see being in hospitality as a profession. It's like a part-time job that you do, and I guess a lot of that stems from the culture of how people treat the hospitality industry - they don't see it as people do overseas," Surrey says.

Research by the EMA last year indicated that the skills shortage in food and beverage began during the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, when skilled staff were lured to Australia.

It appears that many have not returned. An increase in the number of tourists coming to New Zealand has also been a factor.

The tourism and hospitality industry has made a detailed industry investigation into skills shortages. It estimates it will need about 17,000 extra staff this year and in every year until 2010 - and that's not including replacing staff who leave.

"There are issues right across the sector in terms of skills shortages," says Bruce Robertson, chief executive of the Hospitality Association.

"We have people who are less well-trained than is desirable in our front line. I guess we make up for that lack of skills and training and experience through New Zealanders' natural enthusiasm and good nature, and I think we are making do, but we could do better."

The shortage of qualified, experienced florists was sparked in part by a run on unqualified people buying florist shops and needing qualified people to run them, says Carol King, national secretary of New Zealand Professional Florists.

"There's obviously no shortage of unqualified people - not professionally trained - who can knock up a bunch of flowers and put it at the door. But qualified, professional florists at senior level, you could count them probably on your hands and your feet across the country."

Rotorua's Jenkins adds that in-shop training isn't as prevalent as it was once, so many junior florists straight out of polytechnic aren't able to further develop their skills. The ones who do learn tend to then go overseas, where New Zealand florists are highly regarded.

"So we're not getting any seniors coming through, because there's nobody there," she says.

The Department of Labour last week released the results of a survey of a selection of panel shops that advertised for staff last year. Only half the vacancies were filled within six weeks of advertising and on average there was slightly less than one suitable applicant for each vacancy.

If employers had any applicants at all they were of poor quality. Panel beaters with five or more years' experience were hard to find, which could be a reflection on the fact that we're having more accidents, according to the department.

Demand for panelbeaters dropped between 1991 and 2001 because of a drop in the number of accidents, a drop in the price of second-hand cars - making it often cheaper to write off a car than fix it - and the adoption of labour-saving methods. Fewer panelbeaters entered the industry.

But since 2001 the number of accidents has risen, as has the number of cars on our roads and the distances they travel.

Robinson also blames a void between the dissolution of the old apprenticeships' programme and the introduction of the new one, which discouraged people from entering the industry and frustrated trainees keen to get qualifications.

"And what has compounded that is the fact that kids aren't coming into the trades. Ideally, we should be training kids straight out of school.

"We have a huge problem with that because parents want their kids to go into the professions. We have to educate parents and kids that coming into the trades is actually a viable option."

Many of the employers and employers' groups contacted by the Weekend Herald across industries as disparate as dentistry, agriculture, retail and engineering were using immigration to plug immediate gaps.

John Fegan, who runs a rural recruitment consultancy, is bringing in about 100 people a year to work on New Zealand dairy, beef and sheep farms, mainly from Britain, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

"I could import more if I could find more. There's not the Kiwis there to pick up the work. The reality is, in the medium term, we aren't going to attract more people because we're competing against other industries. We're not going to get a whole big rush of Kiwis deciding they want to be farmers. We'll work hard at it, but we won't get a big rush."

Theories on long-term solutions vary. Mostly they are a combination of enticing home skilled, expatriate New Zealanders, improving training within industries, targeting schoolchildren to make them aware of their options and adopting labour-saving practices, particularly in agriculture. 

Economic conditions might also ease the shortages, but not for another year. The Department of Labour expects that high demand for labour, low unemployment and falls in net migration will keep skills shortages at high levels this year.

But shortages are predicted to ease next year because of an expected slowing of economic growth from 4.6 per cent in the year to last September to about 3 per cent this year and next. This will affect the construction industry particularly.

In the meantime, people around the country in all sorts of occupations are simply working harder to fill the gaps. Andrew Cleland, chief executive of the Institute of Professional Engineers of New Zealand, says some engineering work is being delayed but staff are shouldering the biggest load.

"Companies are trying to respond by simply working harder. The staff are working longer hours than they used to. They're trying not to turn down work but do it by calling more on their staff."

At Harbourside, Surrey expects the winter months - always quieter - will provide the reprieve that isn't coming from the ads. Meantime, it's all hands on deck.

"A lot of the staff are doing six-day weeks and extra shifts. Obviously everyone's under a lot of pressure. They're very tired."

Is anyone interested?

The hard-pressed Tourism and hospitality sector needs:

Call centre staff*
Chefs
Cleaners*
Food and beverage staff*
Floor managers*
Hospitality supervisors
Housekeeping staff*
Kitchen hands*
Maintenance staff*
Porters*
Rafting supervisors*
Rental car groomers*
Riding instructors*
Ski and snowboard technicians
Spa therapists*
Tour coach drivers*
Tour guides*
Travel consultant (senior)
Waiting and bar staff*


All occupations taken from Department of Labour long term and immediate skills shortage lists, except those marked with *, taken from the Tourism Workforce and Skill Projection Report, published by the tourism industry.

What we're missing

In Agriculture and horticulture there's a shortage of:

Arborists
Assistant herd managers
Bulb horticulturists (Otago/Southland)
Crop foremen
Crop product/agronomist managers
Farm managers (dairy, sheep/arable, beef)
Grower managers
Orchard foremen
Orchard managers
Pig farm managers
Shearers (upper North Island, Wellington and upper South Island/Canterbury)
Sheep scanners (central North Island and Otago/Southland)
Shepherds
Winemakers/viticulturists (Wellington, Canterbury/upper South Island)