British marketing consultant Johnny Moore voices something that has bothered me in The Tyranny of the Explicit. He writes about "a creeping extension of the need for academic qualifications, the ability to write clever essays."

He says:

The intention is good, but the practical effect is to engulf people in explicit, complicated systems and reduce their freedom – based on an unconscious assumption that everyone is not to be trusted. We give ascendancy to people who are really great at theory and effectively degrade practice. I think its rooted in the idea that one person or a group of people can effectively oversee a system and control how it works with written instructions.

One aspect of this is the arse-covering qualifications provide. If, say, a marketing manager hires a copywriter with a degree in copy-writing, they feel they are not to blame if the writer fails to deliver.

There's an incentive inside most organisations to engage the best-qualified person for a task, not the most experienced, best skilled or highest performer.

Despite the global financial meltdown and widespread lay-offs, Australia still faces serious skills shortages. The obvious answer is to drag in workers with the right qualifications and experience from overseas.

It’s not hard to attract skilled people to Australia; from many places overseas it can almost look like a Shangri-la. However, the bureaucratic hoops are daunting and, technology skills requirements are a fast-moving target so often, by the time applications are processed, employers demands have changed.

Today’s The Australian Financial Review reports the way the country grants overseas technology professionals entry to the country is set for an overhaul in IT projects force migration target change (the story is behind a pay wall). There’s a similar report at The Sydney Morning Herald : Migration rules set for revamp.

This is going to propel Australia’s economy. There are a number of big tech projects underway and a shortage of suitably skilled people to do the work. I’d like to see New Zealand take similar measures to make sure our nation had the skills it needs to compete on the world stage. Taking unemployed or under-employed professionals from the US, UK and other northern hemisphere countries that can’t or won’t make use of them makes a lot of sense.

The recession has seen Immigration New Zealand cut 44 occupations from its skill shortage list. The new Essential Skills in Demand list now features just 87 occupations. People in listed occupations can be fast-tracked through the migration process.

Many of the occupations taken off the skill shortage list are trades, not positions filled by knowledge workers. On the other hand those remaining are mainly professional and knowledge-based roles.

Jobs no longer on New Zealand’s skills-shortage list include:

• Baker.
• Bicycle mechanic.
• Bricklayer.
• Butcher.
• Carpenter.
• Dental assistant.
• Motor mechanic.
• Plasterer.
• Scaffolder.
• Screen printer.
• Sommelier.

New Zealand’s Essential Skills in Demand Lists

Jennifer Foreshew says; “The federal Government’s recent shake-up of the skilled migration scheme has not affected IT workers coming here from overseas, but their job prospects are drying up, recruiters say.”

She says demand for workers with IT skills is falling, which is true. Yet my recent reading tells me Australia still has shortages of a number of highly-specific tech skills. If you’re thinking of emigrating it may pay to stay up to date with the latest information regarding your speciality.

Foreign workers feel the squeeze as slowdown hits | Australian IT

Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs first appeared in 1954. The world has changed enormously over the past 55 years and critics have challenged Maslow.

You can read more about Maslow and his hierarchy of needs in Motivation and the hierarchy of needs. There's criticism in Challenging Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

Maslow's hierarchy is often shown as a pyramid. There’s an implication people move up the pyramid as their lives improve.

For an example, a knowledge worker will gain skills, win responsibility and in turn earn extra income taking care of the lower levels of the hierarchy.

According to Maslow this makes it possible to move up to self-actualisation – a kind of western nirvana.

Today’s global financial crisis means many workers are moving in the opposite direction.

Being laid off is traumatic. In some cases people can be at the pinnacle of the hierarchy one day and slide all the way to the bottom the moment the pink slip appears. Finding food, shelter and warmth is suddenly the most important thing on the agenda.

Of course many redundant workers pick themselves up and climb back up the pyramid. The journey is easier the second time around. Knowing the route and recognising the landmarks along the way helps.

Maslow's theory works well enough on the four bottom stages. You only have to look around and see people at each level. And occasionally you’ll notice people moving up or down.

I don’t think I’ve seen many self-actualised pyramid toppers.

Even in the good times before the economy went pear-shaped Brahmins were thin on the ground. This would be especially so in the higher echelons of the economy (which is where you might expect to find them given the pyramid). Smug, self-satisfied bastards were everywhere.

What does this tell me?

Maslow's hierarchy is a useful theory, but it’s not a pyramid. It is a four step ladder. And each step up the ladder links to slides that will take you back down again. In other words, a game of snakes and ladders.

One of the themes of the Knowledge Workers web site over the past year has been the need to recognise and understand the role of skills in a modern economy. Despite the current recession, many skills are still in short supply. And this is acting as a break on the smart innovative companies that can drag New Zealand, or that matter any other country, out of the current economic mess.

New Zealand’s Productive Economy Council has weighed in to the debate making an interesting plea to the government over skilled migrant workers. In a press release the Council said; “

The government needs to think carefully before deciding to limit temporary work visas for skilled migrants or interfere in any way with the retention decisions of companies.

Cutting back on the number of skilled workers entering New Zealand would be a sure-fire way of making the recession last longer and bite deeper. That’s not an opinion, it’s a simple statement of fact.

There are roles in industry and elsewhere that create real wealth and add real value. These are skilled positions. The people doing those jobs earn money which circulates elsewhere in the economy and pays taxes. Restricting the pool of available skilled workers to perform those tasks is a way of hobbling our industries.

All migrants create work and wealth. People who bring much-needed skills to New Zealand create even more work and wealth.

The Productive Economy Council'sSelwyn Pellett says:

The High Tech sector has only been able to survive in New Zealand thanks to skilled migrants and without them we would progressively lose over $2 billion in exports generated from that sector alone, and I suspect these figures apply in other elaborately transformed export sectors.

Scoop: NZ business needs to protect its core skills

A press release issued by the London-based Work Foundation says employers are poorly equipped to weather the recession because they use workers' skills and talents poorly, tie them up with rules and give them little say over how they do their work. The link at the bottom of this post will take you to the full press release.

While the press release is specific to the UK, Australia and New Zealand will be similar.

I've never heard of the Work Foundation. It turns out it is a rebooted version of  The Industrial Society.

The name and business model changed in 2002. The Industrial Society is an 80-year old independent organisation campaigning to improve people's working lives. It studies issues like work-life balance.  The board and directorate are people drawn from the real world of industry, not academia.

The press release writer emphasises the waste of bad management from an employer point of view. And rightly so. Showing managers how their behaviour damages their business' performance is one way to get to sit up and take notice.

But from an employee point of view this waste is even more disheartening.

There's nothing worse than working in a job where your skills are under-used, you spend hours wading through bureaucracy and feel powerless to make changes — even ones that would obviously improve the company's performance.

Employers who waste human resources this way deserve to fail.

The Work Foundations survey of the work-lives of 2011 workers found that:

• 40 percent of employees have more skills than their jobs require

• 65 percent of workers said the primary characteristic of the organisations they worked for was 'rule and policy bound' – though just five per cent said this was their preference

• 40 percent said they had little or no flexibility over the hours they worked

• 20 percent of graduates are in 'low knowledge content' jobs

There’s always a demand for key skills. When the corner finally turns on the global economic recession there will be a huge pent-up demand for technical expertise. That’s because few companies are investing in employee skills.

When they decide they need those skills, it’ll be too late to start training; so they’ll need to pay a premium.

Your mission is to capture that premium.

What are the skills that will be earn you better rates over the coming years and how do you get them?

The skills employers most want break down into four main categories:

• basic technical know-how;
• formal education;
• relevant business skills and vertical market experience; and
• knowledge of specific hardware and applications.

Basic know-how

Basic technical know-how is about finding your way around equipment and systems.

In the past, employers would expect a narrow band of system or even application specific skills. Today’s employers prefer people to have a more catholic approach to technology. You’ll be expected to be familiar with a range of products. If  you have a weak spot, you should brush up your knowledge in that area.

While employers used to accept that new employees needed initial training and a settling in period. When modern employers hire workers, they expect productivity from day one. If you can’t make a start on the first morning in a new role, you may not get asked back for day two.

There are exceptions. Some employers recognise their systems are unusual and may give some initial training. However, recruitment specialists say this is becoming unusual and that one reasons for the persistent skills shortage is  employers will not hire people whose skills profile is a ‘near miss’.

Formal education

Of course, your track record and references are the best sign you have the right basic know-how. However, a good, relevant tertiary qualification is a better indicator.

Figures from Australia’s Graduate Career Council show a person with an undergraduate degree can expect to earn between $10,000 and $20,000 a year more than non-graduates.

In IT the gap between graduates and non-graduates is higher, for hourly paid contractors a good undergraduate degree is worth an extra $25 an hour.

People with higher degrees can expect to earn the same amount again. On that basis you can expect to cover the cost of a postgraduate IT qualification in about two years – though you might never recover the opportunity cost of the income you’ll lose while studying.

Business Skills

In the past, technical skills and some formal education would have been enough to keep the average knowledge worker in employment from now until retirement. This is no longer the case. These days employers demand IT workers also have business savvy. In some cases this is as simple as just having good communications skills – though generally they want more.

Part of the reason for this is the changing nature of IT. Historically IT projects were strictly backroom affairs, taking place in an environment, which developed, let’s say, something of a counter-culture. Most of the work was cutting code or tweaking applications and required little contact with users and only rudimentary understanding of the business processes being automated.

In recent years, IT has moved centre stage. Today’s IT professionals spend a lot of time with other workers, understanding how the business works is now crucial. Consequently, communications skills – we’re talking about the ability to share ideas and concepts with colleagues, not making two computers talk to each other – are at a premium.

If you’re thinking of getting a formal qualification, it makes sense to take a course that combines technical components with business modules. Many universities now offer postgraduate IT courses that embrace accounting, law, management sciences and other business disciplines.

Specific Skills

Of course the main reason an employer may want to hire you is to plug in-house knowledge gaps. Your specific skills are most important. Right now there is a still a huge demand for key skills.

According to Network skills in demand, pay well in down economy in Network World:

76 percent of CIOs are looking for desktop support skills

65 percent are looking for network administration skills

64 percent are looking for Windows administration sills

Database management, telecommunications support and network management are all still highly sought after.

Web development, virtualisation and business intelligence are in demand.

ERP implementation, .Net development and Linux administration are also hot.

As you’d expect any formal qualification featuring one of the keywords mentioned above is worth upwards of $10 an hour over other IT positions. If you can combine these with recognised business know-how, you could be looking at earning considerably more.

While vendor specific certification from the likes Microsoft and Cisco are unlikely to translate into large rate premiums, they will help make sure you get picked in front of rivals.

Finally, your practical experience is so important that it is worth making sacrifices to do some jobs purely for their CV value. Even a short-term contract in a position of responsibility on a successful or high-profile project could be worth a premium with future employers.