A NEW government-funded role to advance Gisborne’s economic prospects has drawn international attention from people wanting to provide direct support to local businesses.
Last month the government-appointed senior regional official for Gisborne confirmed the Government would provide Activate Tairawhiti with $125,000 to create and implement a regional economic development action plan. Activate Tairawhiti chief executive Steve Breen said some of that funding would go towards employing a dedicated project manager to implement the plan.
“Activate Tairawhiti is working with the council and government to create this regional economic development action plan, and so the next step is to broaden the engagement with the region’s stakeholders. At the same time as producing the action plan, we also want to implement actions.
“The Achilles heel of this sort of work, historically, has been that a lot of work goes into producing the plan and then nothing else happens.”
Mr Breen said the new project manager would also be responsible for taking forward Activate Tairawhiti’s existing work plan, which would eventually sit under the wider action plan.
“This resource is going to pick up these actions and implement them, while the wider plan is delivered. Part of the process at the moment is to assess the candidates and seeing if their skill sets best suit those projects we are looking at, to see which projects they can take on.”
Projects in the workforce development portfolioThe role would also manage projects within Activate Tairawhiti’s workforce development portfolio.
“Workforce development is a key area, making sure we have the people with the right skills and experience for the work that is out there. We have already flagged that the forestry and wood sector, in particular, have projected up to 500 jobs coming up over the next five years.”
Mr Breen said Activate Tairawhiti would work with local businesses to find out how to make sure those jobs could be filled by suitably-qualified local people.
“At the moment, broadly speaking, when a young person leaves school, it’s a key transition point in their life. So we are working with agencies, employers and education providers to better support young people better make that next decision on what to do with themselves.”
Activate Tairawhiti’s role would be to work with employers here to establish what their labour and candidate requirements were to ensure young people had the best opportunity to fulfil those requirements.
That would provide better information for young people about what they needed to do to secure employment, as well as making employers more aware of what they needed to do to find suitable local applicants for available roles.
“If we give everybody locally the best chance of securing jobs, and there are roles available, then it will also be a matter of how we attract skilled people to come and live in Gisborne.”
That would also allow Mr Breen more time to work with the council and government, and to directly engage with key local businesses to identify what the opportunities are, and what constraints needed to be removed to realise those opportunities.
“The other area of work will be how to support existing businesses to invest in new opportunities, and that comes back to the regional action plan and AT’s involvement with key businesses. If they have identified opportunities then this project manager could provide them with direct support to realise those opportunities.
More than 20 people have applied for the position, including applications from Australia and Indonesia, and Mr Breen expected the successful candidate would be in place by the end of next month.