Why New Zealand Needs to Train More Skilled Workers

Before COVID-19 brought upheaval to the world’s labor markets, New Zealand was already suffering from both regional and long-term skills shortages. To meet the demand for skilled workers, the country was actively recruiting skilled talent from abroad.

According to Immigration New Zealand, the country anticipates immediate future needs of about 47,000 more workers per year. Their original plan was to fill these roles with skilled workers from overseas.

However, COVID-19 put an unexpected damper on those plans. In response to the virus, the country closed its borders to foreign entry, essentially locking out the skilled laborers they need to recruit.

The border closures are expected to remain in effect for most of 2021, according to a recent announcement from New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Adern.

New Zealand has skills shortages in many of the same industries that other developed countries do: healthcare, engineering, technology and construction. Between the global shortages of these workers and New Zealand’s closed borders, recruiting sufficient numbers of workers from abroad is an option that’s unlikely to be viable in the short term.

Instead, it seems more realistic for New Zealand to solve the labor shortage by actively recruiting and training new skilled workers to meet the market’s demands.

In much of the rest of the world, labor markets are shifting as a result of peoples’ response to COVID-19. Entire industries such as hospitality and travel have been disrupted. While New Zealand was not unaffected by these phenomena, COVID-19 hasn’t been as disruptive to employment rates in New Zealand as it has been in some other countries.

Before COVID-19, unemployment levels in New Zealand hovered at around 4 percent; according to the most recent data available, it is now more like 5.3 percent, with expectations that it will most likely climb to somewhere between 5.4 percent and 5.7 percent in the near future.

It would be prudent for some of New Zealand’s workers displaced by COVID-19 to retrain and upskill with a goal of filling the skilled labor shortages at home.

In particular, more healthcare workers will be needed. New Zealand’s population is ageing. If demographic trends continue along their current trajectory, it is likely that as many as 27 percent of New Zealanders will be over the age of 65 years by 2050. In contrast, seniors over 65 were only 15 percent of the New Zealand population in 2016.

Furthermore, COVID-19 has put a strain on the country’s front-line healthcare workers, with nursing shortages and staffing shortages becoming more dire in the country’s managed isolation and quarantine facilities.

New Zealand has an urgent need to train new nurses, because there’s a disproportionately high number of ageing nurses in their existing talent pool. At the same time, enrollments in New Zealand’s nursing schools have been falling.

New Zealand has the capability to train the workers needed locally. The country is home to eight world-class universities. New Zealand has also established a robust system of colleges offering TAFE training courses; these are similar to trade schools in the United States in that they prepare students to work in a broad variety of trades including building, construction and many other business sectors.

New Zealand isn’t unique in its need to solve talent shortages and retrain displaced workers. Worker retraining is also a top agenda item of concern for the United States Department of Labor, the Australian government and think tanks like the Brookings Institution. It’s a global problem that some of the world’s most brilliant minds are working on but have thus far been less than fully successful at solving.