Canterbury a Mecca for job seekers

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NZ's total of building trades workers needs to double to 155,400 over the next five years, say training groups.

"Come south, young family" is the message coming out of Canterbury after a dramatic jump in job vacancies to help rebuild the earthquake-damaged region.

More than 2900 new jobs in the region were listed on the Seek website last month - 57 per cent more than in August last year, before the earthquakes started on September 4, and the region's highest in any month since at least 2007.

Numbers on the unemployment benefit in the region have also fallen by almost 500 from a peak of 6342 in June to 5878 on August 26.

National figures for last month will not be out until next week but the national tally rose by 855 in July, making the drop in Canterbury even more remarkable.

But the building industry is worried there will not be enough skilled people to meet the needs of the $30 billion reconstruction programme. Construction industry training organisations have told the Tertiary Education Commission that New Zealand's total of building trades workers needs to double - from 77,740 now to 155,400 - over the next five years to cope with rebuilding Christchurch, the national leaky home crisis and general economic recovery.

"We are going to have a significant shortage of skilled labour," said Ruma Karaitiana of the Building and Construction Industry Training Organisation.

Warwick Quinn of the Master Builders Federation said: "There is no doubt we are going to need external immigration support, and it's not just in the trade areas, it's also in the professional areas such as engineering, geotechnical engineering, architecture, design and supervision."

The Canterbury Employment and Skills Board, set up after the quakes to co-ordinate the training and recruitment effort, has begun a campaign to lure people from the rest of New Zealand to help fill the gap.

Board chairman Carl Davidson said people were realising that rebuilding Christchurch could take as long as 15 years because there would not be enough workers to do it any more quickly.

"If you want to do the rebuild really quickly, you are going to need tens of thousands of additional people," he said.

"If you push it out over 10 or 15 years you still need significantly more people than the Christchurch market can provide but it's not 'oh my God!'."

Seek national manager Janet Faulding said the growth in job vacancies was widespread, with the biggest numbers in communications and technology, trades, and office/administration. Engineering and construction jobs were in the top 10 but not at the very top.

Christchurch's biggest private sector employer, Tait Radio Communications, with 630 local workers, has almost 50 vacancies in the city driven by export-led growth of 10 per cent a year over the past two years, regardless of the earthquakes.

"The high-tech industry here is an ecosystem. For every role that we have there are three to five other roles in suppliers throughout the region," said Tait chief executive Frank Owen.

"The high-tech industry here is robust. No high-tech companies were disabled by the earthquakes.

"It's amazing what you get used to - while it's hard for certain cases and for certain people, there's no question that business continues to be done very much as usual."