Tony Collins: Turbulent time ahead

Mark Andrews, a second-year building apprentice, is one of many in the industry benefiting from Northland's building boom - but it can be hard for people to get work without previous experience. Photo / John Stone

In the past two years respondents to surveys undertaken by the Chamber of Commerce and other business organisations advise that they are likely to be considering employing more workers in the near future but also that they expect to experience difficulties finding the right employee.

At the same time it would have escaped no one's notice that there are still portions of our population - often young people - who are not employed and not able to benefit from our improving economy.

Generally when these prospective employers are asked what they are looking for, their expectations are on the face of it quite realistic. They were also highlighted recently on social media by a tongue-in-cheek advertisement placed by a builder outlining what he wanted from prospective job applicants.

Apart from these characteristics, another impediment is lack of job experience and this is obviously harder to tackle. Without work you cannot get job experience, and without job experience you cannot get work.

I imagine the importance of job experience is not so much to demonstrate skills directly associated with the prospective employment but to provide evidence of the other characteristics that are commonly seen as important to all employees.

There are many people working extremely hard with the best of intentions to place our region's young people in employment and every single success should be celebrated as it has the potential for life-changing results.

The work they are doing should not be undervalued but whatever is being done at present within the current constraints that are placed on them is only resulting in minor improvements to overall employment figures.

While larger businesses have support, HR departments or can afford to use recruitment agencies, this is not always the case for small businesses.

Given that most Northland businesses are very small and may only very rarely take on workers, these business owners may not always have the necessary skills to ensure a positive outcome for all parties involved.

There appears to be a lack of flexibility within the current approach and a lack of recognition of the role that small businesses could play in changing these figures.