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Over a Million New Zealand Workers Need Digital Training Next Year

Responding to a just-released report by the private sector, NZTech Chief Executive Graeme Muller says it’s not that surprising to know New Zealand needs to upskill a million Kiwi workers with better digital skills next year. The industry body leader reasoned the development shows just how much COVID has accelerated the drive to digital for most businesses in New Zealand and around the world.

NZTech is New Zealand’s body that’s mainly focused on making the country a digital nation. The organisation made headlines when it led a government-funded marketing campaign to showcase Aoteroan technological expertise to the world.

There is no silver bullet to this global digital skills shortage, but if New Zealand can accelerate our local response we stand to gain considerable benefits including creating many higher-value jobs, improved employee satisfaction and output, high productivity and high-value exports.

– Graeme Muller, Chief Executive Officer, NZTech

Muller’s comments were directed at research recently released by one of the biggest cloud computing services in the country. The study pointed out that over 1 million New Zealand workers will need digital skills training in the next year. It also detailed that workers that needed the training would not just be from the tech sector but from across the entire economy.

The training needed is not just all about IT. As the lead researcher of the study explained the vast majority of digitally skilled workers are working across the economy in manufacturing, in agriculture and using their digital skills in their day-to-day work. Furthermore, the study enumerated the number of workers that needed training.

  • over 650,000 already had some digital skills but would need to retrain
  • 350,000 workers had no digital skills and needed to be fully trained

Moreover, the study revealed that the two most highly sought after digital skills were in cloud computing and cybersecurity. This reflected the current needs of businesses over the last few years. Muller, however, recalled that since 2020, their group has been calling for New Zealand to develop more digital talent. Specifically, NZTech’s digital skills for a digital future report released in 2020 highlighted the decreasing number of students learning digital skills in our education system and the growing need to have digital skills in many jobs.

He expounded that the government has been steadily pursuing an aggressive plan to encourage more New Zealanders to take up digital skills. He cites that Aotearoa’s digital industry transformation plan has a large section dedicated to the critical need for improving New Zealand’s digital skills in order to ensure the digital sector continues to grow at a pace creating thousands of new high paying jobs for Kiwis.

The digital road mad has been currently out for consultation by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, as reported on OpenGov Asia. While it may address the issue of lack of digital skills, in the long run, the need for the country to address the talent shortage becomes more pressing as the days go by.

Indeed, Wellington has been actively pursuing its digital transformation with great intent. Just recently, it eased its borders to ICT workers from other countries, as reported on OpenGov Asia. Still, it may have to find more ingenious ways to address its growing talent shortage — and fast.

PARTNER

Qlik’s vision is a data-literate world, where everyone can use data and analytics to improve decision-making and solve their most challenging problems. A private company, Qlik offers real-time data integration and analytics solutions, powered by Qlik Cloud, to close the gaps between data, insights and action. By transforming data into Active Intelligence, businesses can drive better decisions, improve revenue and profitability, and optimize customer relationships. Qlik serves more than 38,000 active customers in over 100 countries.

PARTNER

CTC Global Singapore, a premier end-to-end IT solutions provider, is a fully owned subsidiary of ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation (CTC) and ITOCHU Corporation.

Since 1972, CTC has established itself as one of the country’s top IT solutions providers. With 50 years of experience, headed by an experienced management team and staffed by over 200 qualified IT professionals, we support organizations with integrated IT solutions expertise in Autonomous IT, Cyber Security, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure, Workplace Modernization and Professional Services.

Well-known for our strengths in system integration and consultation, CTC Global proves to be the preferred IT outsourcing destination for organizations all over Singapore today.

PARTNER

Planview has one mission: to build the future of connected work. Our solutions enable organizations to connect the business from ideas to impact, empowering companies to accelerate the achievement of what matters most. Planview’s full spectrum of Portfolio Management and Work Management solutions creates an organizational focus on the strategic outcomes that matter and empowers teams to deliver their best work, no matter how they work. The comprehensive Planview platform and enterprise success model enables customers to deliver innovative, competitive products, services, and customer experiences. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, with locations around the world, Planview has more than 1,300 employees supporting 4,500 customers and 2.6 million users worldwide. For more information, visit www.planview.com.

SUPPORTING ORGANISATION

SIRIM is a premier industrial research and technology organisation in Malaysia, wholly-owned by the Minister​ of Finance Incorporated. With over forty years of experience and expertise, SIRIM is mandated as the machinery for research and technology development, and the national champion of quality. SIRIM has always played a major role in the development of the country’s private sector. By tapping into our expertise and knowledge base, we focus on developing new technologies and improvements in the manufacturing, technology and services sectors. We nurture Small Medium Enterprises (SME) growth with solutions for technology penetration and upgrading, making it an ideal technology partner for SMEs.

PARTNER

HashiCorp provides infrastructure automation software for multi-cloud environments, enabling enterprises to unlock a common cloud operating model to provision, secure, connect, and run any application on any infrastructure. HashiCorp tools allow organizations to deliver applications faster by helping enterprises transition from manual processes and ITIL practices to self-service automation and DevOps practices. 

PARTNER

IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud and AI, and business services provider. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Nearly 3,000 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and business services deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.

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