HR consultant defends Winz training

Photo / Glenn Taylor

Winz training courses can be a "win-win-win" for employers and clients, a Hawke's Bay HR consultant says - despite national statistics showing low employment outcomes from such courses.

In the East Coast region, from Gisborne to Napier-Hastings, 408 people have been put through the new Work & Income NZ (Winz) training course Skills For Industry since 2012, official figures show. About a third of those people ended up in work on average, nationwide.

Employment training schemes funded by Winz to get beneficiaries into work have cost a nationwide total of $50.9 million since 2012, and that's to fund subsidies alone. In the East Coast region, $2.37 million has been spent since 2012 paying wage subsidies to employers, covering 894 work contracts.

Winz has not measured long-term outcomes of Flexi-Wages or the Skills For Industry programme, but nationwide figures revealed just a 36 per cent employment achievement eight weeks after course completion.

Previous programmes, including Training for Work, also showed a third of participants achieving employment. East Coast figures showed 971 people went through 13-week Training For Work courses, leading to just 221 employment outcomes.

Just 149 out of the 408 Skills For Industry participants recorded an employment outcome after eight weeks.

The funding cost of Skills For Industry nationally was $12.5 million in 2013-14.

Hawke's Bay human resources consultant Steve Evans from People Central has a strong relationship with Winz. "Typically we've done a lot of work when there have been closures and redundancies," Mr Evans said. "We've worked on CV design job search techniques."

He had some familiarity with Skills For Industry, but Training For Work remained the predominant local method by which Winz gets people into work.

Mr Evans had worked successfully with Winz and Eastern Institute of Technology to put people through Training For Work for a Kiwibank contact centre in Hastings in what he called a "win-win-win" arrangement.

"There were some incentives, some sweeteners after the course to help people into work. That was the first time I saw incentives working well."

Auckland's Beneficiaries Advocacy & Information Service manager Karen Pattie said she was aware of some employers "getting cheap labour, then flicking them off weeks later".