The job crisis for young New Zealanders

What is our youth unemployment rate? And what will it take to get more of our young people into work?

Just the job

A small town successfully keeps its young people employed.

Apprentices Hamish Loomans and Tony Milne, photo Sarah Ivey/NZH

Otorohanga Mayor Dale Williams has discovered the solution to youth unemployment and it is not, as he puts it, “rocket science”. Since 2006, his small King Country district – population 9500 – has maintained close to zero registered unemployment among people under 25, thanks to a suite of locally run programmes aimed at preparing youngsters for work, and meeting the needs of local employers.

“It’s very cool,” says Williams, who also chairs the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs. “When I walk down the street there are no groups of kids with hoodies on kicking tin cans around. There are kids that look you in the eye and have a chat.” Ironically, Otorohanga’s determination to come up with better ways of matching young people with local firms emerged at the peak of the skills crisis in 2005. Jobs and apprenticeships were being advertised, but local youth weren’t applying for them. Companies were forced to look further afield for the workers they needed, and some were contemplating leaving.

Williams, a mechanic who owned a motorcycle dealership in the town, says he and another businessman, Andrew Giltrap, began investigating the problem and found the relationship between local businesses and the high school was poor, and employers were not doing a good job of presenting career opportunities to school leavers. Rather than taking up the jobs on offer locally, young people were heading out of town to take up apprenticeships and training courses elsewhere. The upshot was a set of programmes aimed at making local youngsters “more attractive to local businesses, and local businesses more attractive to young people”.

Waikato Institute of Technology was convinced to set up a trade training centre in the town. Williams says all courses are designed by local businesses. “We don’t teach any courses in our polytech that don’t have a job at the end of it. We don’t teach airy-fairy crap that gives the kid a certificate that’s meaningless.”

An apprenticeship co-ordinator, Ray Haley, was employed to support young people through trade training. Haley – dubbed “camp mother” – runs weekly night-school sessions to help apprentices with their bookwork, liaises with employers and is on call to help out with all manner of crises in the lives of his young charges – from car breakdowns to girlfriend and family problems. This wraparound care has no doubt contributed to Otorohanga’s apprentice completion rate of 96%, compared with 35% nationally.

All school leavers in the district are contacted and offered support as they make the transition into work or training. Even those who choose to leave town to study elsewhere are encouraged to get in touch if they need support. Many are helped into summer jobs when they come back during university holidays. The district also runs an annual careers expo to showcase local job opportunities, and an annual apprentice graduation ceremony and young achievers awards to celebrate the success of those who make it through their training.

‘Everything we do is focused on preparing young people for work,” says Williams. “New Zealand for years has had a very clear academic pathway, where you go to college and then on to university or polytech and get a degree. But I say to people if the career you have chosen needs a degree, then get one. But don’t be confused that a degree makes you more employable. Communities like mine need farmers and tradespeople and blue-collar workers.”

Education Minister Anne Tolley’s move to introduce “vocational pathways” for young people to move into sectors such as construction, manufacturing, farming, the service sector and community work is a step in the right direction, he says. But he believes the advice students get from school careers advisors is generally “patchy”.

“Most careers advisors are teachers, so they advise young people – other than the absolute worst in the school – to go and get a degree. That just produces people in their twenties with massive debt, and really highly qualified dole queues.” He thinks it’s a mistake for the Government to focus transition-to-work support only on those deemed at risk: 16- and 17-year-olds and the so-called “neets” – not in education, employment or training. Central to Otorohanga’s success is that support is offered to every school leaver. “If employment is the ultimate goal, and you are only focusing on those ‘at risk’, employers won’t buy into the programme. If the only kids you are working with are the troublemakers, there is a limit to how many trouble­makers an employer will take on.

“Also, we found that a lot of kids would not have been on anyone’s list if they were pre-assessed as ‘at risk’ – but they are teenagers, they are all at risk of something. And plenty of kids from the so-called best families trip up and stumble, and they really respond to that pastoral care.

“It really seems that with a lot of dysfunctional and blended families there are a lot of kids at that 16, 17, 18 age group who need someone who is independent, community-driven, and who walks alongside them for a short period of time and says, ‘Whatever you want and need, I will help you through it.’”

Williams says he hears employers all around the country saying they want to employ young people in their regions, but they are often not work-ready. “They’re a liability straight out of school. They’ve been kissed and cuddled, Mum has made their lunch and they’re told what to do every hour of the day.” He says one of the most important programmes his district runs is a work preparation course, where skills such as driving, first aid, time management and tool identification are taught.

“We have a lot of 17-year-old boys who want to be mechanics and will be good mechanics, but they can’t tell the difference between a crescent and a ring spanner because they haven’t got a dad [around], and so they don’t have a dad’s shed. When I became a mechanic I’d spent years on the farm, mucking around with stuff. These are all good kids, but they are just starting from further back …

“This is not rocket science. It’s just going in with your eyes and ears open and being non-judgmental.” He believes a key lesson for communities – and the nation – in addressing the issue of youth unemployment is to stop thinking and talking about young people as a “problem”.

“I go into so many communities where they say, ‘Our kids are a problem and we called you in because we wanted to hear how you fixed your problem.’ If you are going around as leaders talking about young people as a problem, then they will hear that, and they will pick up on that and they will naturally realise your expectations and they will be problems. We talk about our kids here as a valuable resource that we can prepare for the opportunities that we know exist.”

And he believes the kind of solutions Otorohanga has found are applicable in every community. “I go to Marlborough, and talk to Mayor [Alistair] Sowman and he’s pulling his hair out because they are importing people from Kiribati to pick in the vineyards. And I go over to the Bay of Plenty and they are bringing in Papua New Guineans to pick, yet we have 10,000 young unemployed in Manukau City.”

Williams says New Zealand needs a youth-to-work strategy – a “commitment that all young people, whatever pathway they choose, can end up in a job. We don’t have that at the moment.” And though that commitment needs to be national, its implementation needs to be put in the hands of local communities. Of Otorohanga’s 11 programmes, only three receive central government funding – a total of $124,000 a year. “So the Government’s return on investment is huge. The Mayors Taskforce has always argued for local solutions to local issues. We have never said to the Government, ‘You don’t give us enough money.’ But we have said, ‘Be more discrete in how you invest it with us, trust us more, threaten us less and you will get the outcome.’

“Partnerships work; prescriptive agreements that demand milestone reports and output reports just drive the volunteers to distraction, and it ruins the intent of good programmes when you overcomplicate them.”

Although youth unemployment has become a key issue for this year’s election, Williams says it has to be elevated above the three-year election cycle. “If we are to make long-term intergenerational change, we have to look over party lines and look at committing to long-term investment. Government officials hold the purse strings, but they can’t make any change in our communities without the community driving it.”

– Rebecca Macfie

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