Most employers positive on jobs

By JULIE MIDDLETON

If you're looking for work in the upper North Island between January and June next year, your best prospects are likely to be in the engineering, information technology, retail and health fields.

But there is likely to be less on offer in transport, manufacturing, tourism and the public sector.

The prognosis comes from the TMP Job Index Survey, which is issued every six months and gauges how optimistic bosses are about hiring permanent, fulltime staff in the half-year ahead.

A total of 859 New Zealand general and human resources managers of client companies were interviewed by phone for heavyweight recruiter TMP Worldwide.

In the upper North Island, 60 per cent of engineering firms said they were aiming to increase their head count, compared with those in IT (55.6 per cent), health, medicine and pharmaceuticals (55.6 per cent) and retail (52.6 per cent).

In the lower North Island - the areas below a line drawn between Napier and New Plymouth - bosses were feeling most cheery about taking on more staff in IT (63.6 per cent plan to increase their numbers), education (60 per cent), professional services - law, accountancy and the like (55.2 per cent) - and the health fields (50 per cent).

Pessimists in the survey were those less likely to lift their head-counts or more likely to decrease staff numbers: transport, manufacturing, tourism and government in the upper north, and financial services and manufacturing in the lower north.

But look at the numbers nationally rather than by region, and 42.2 per cent of those surveyed reckoned they would be hiring more staff in the first six months of next year. Just 7.2 per cent were forecasting that staff numbers would fall.

TMP New Zealand general manager Denis Horner admitted that the survey, released today, was skewed towards medium and large corporates.

It tended to the qualitative - employers' gut feelings on hiring given their business plans, the state of their industry, and the economy.

However, the results agreed with a number of local indices, including the monthly ANZ Job Ads series, which measured the numbers of jobs advertised in New Zealand newspapers, he said.

The survey did not delve into what drove the trends, but there was agreement among job experts that an improving economy is helping to fuel business confidence in most areas.

"There is some growth in the economy, and people are able to take advantage of that," said Isabel Evans, Work and Income regional commissioner for South Auckland.

Mr Horner said the growth in call centres continued to drive demand for IT staff in the upper north.

Demand for engineering staff was partly fuelled by a skills shortage, due to a gap between the pool of those who learned their trade under traditional apprenticeships in years gone by, and young people now taking up modern apprenticeships: "You've got a bit of a lag in there".

Mr Horner added that engineering was a field affected by migration overseas of skilled people over the past 10 years: "The skills base has been lost".

The absence of construction from the list of keen hirers showed that industry was well-staffed: "It's reached the peak of its cycle".

* Work and Income's running "top 10" list of job vacancies shows these people are most in demand: process workers (manufacturing), factory hands, sales assistants, general labourers, fruit pickers, fruit growers or workers, cleaners, truck and tanker drivers, and administrators.