British marketing consultant Johnny Moore articulates something that has been bothering 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 disturbing 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 absolved of any blame if the writer stuffs up. There’s an incentive inside most organisations to engage the best-qualified person for a task rather than the most experienced, best skilled or highest performer.

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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 in many cases, by the time applications are processed, employers demands have changed. Read the rest of this entry »

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 rather than 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

Writing in The Australian this morning (March 31, 2009) 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.”

The story 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 specialty.

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 and some criticism in Challenging Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

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

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

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

But 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 can be easier the second time around. Knowing the route and recognising the landmarks along the way helps.

For me, 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.

But 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’s a four step ladder. And each step up the ladder is connected to slides that will take you back down again. In other words, it’s like a game of snakes and ladders.

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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 in rules and procedures, 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 to be the reincarnation of The Industrial Society, which I have heard of. The name and business model were changed in 2002. It is an 80-year independent organisation that campaigns to improve the quality of working life and is interested in issues like work-life balance.  The board and directorate are people drawn from the real world of industry rather than academia.

The press release writer is keen to emphasis the waste this represents from an employer point of view. And rightly so. Showing managers how their wasteful behaviour has a negative effect on 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 underutilised, you spend hours wading through bureaucracy and feel powerless to make changes — even ones that would obviously make a significant difference to the company’s performance. Frankly, 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

via Employers Squandering the Talents of Workers.

Australia’s tech companies are laying workers, but not at the rate similar jobs are being destroyed in the Northern Hemisphere. However this story by Fran Foo in The Australian newspaper and republished in the paper’s online tech site Australian IT says the country’s Department of Immigration has identified a number of key tech skills that are still in short supply.

Specifically the list includes:

• SAP,
• PeopleSoft,
• Siebel,
• network security and
• Java

Foo also lists a number of industries where there is still an unmet demand for tech professionals.

Skills shortage persists as layoffs increase | Australian IT.