A novel approach to the acute shortage of skilled IT workers is creating a new form of employees - cloud workers or people who work for Kiwi companies overseas and may never set foot in New Zealand.
It's come about because an estimated 10,000 IT jobs remain unfilled due to a lack of qualified local candidates and Justin Sharrocks, Sales Manager Modern Workplace at Kordia, a government-owned company offering cloud, cyber security and connectivity solutions to businesses, says: "We call them cloud workers".
"They are set up by Kiwi firms with computers so they can work remotely from their own country," he says.
Although cloud computing is best known for data storage, firms are using it to enable workers they employ within New Zealand to operate remotely as well. Sharrocks says this means companies in Auckland, for example, can hire from other regions because they don't necessarily need them to be in the same city.
He says talent shortages - heightened after Covid-19 hit in 2020 - are creating a massive headache for businesses across the board, particularly in the IT sector. Of the 10,000 positions currently available, he says the industry realistically can only fill 1000 to 2000 locally.
He says before Covid, up to 5000 IT workers were moving to New Zealand every two or three years. But despite the border re-opening, just a fraction of those numbers are now coming here.
"The other problem is that many locals who were hired over the last couple of years are heading overseas to follow better opportunities or go on their OE's now the borders are open. This is adding additional pressure and concerns we will lose more skilled engineers than we gain," Sharrocks says.
"When an organisation lacks the resources in its technical teams, it can really hurt their ability to innovate and grow. What's more, if you're missing important security maintenance tasks, such as regular patching, you're much more vulnerable to cyberattacks."
Sharrocks says Kordia, which has recently grown its Modern Workplace offering, has been supporting businesses with managed and co-managed IT services to cover resourcing gaps.
He says setting up people to work remotely is one solution for businesses while other key strategies include increasing diversity by hiring and training workers from different backgrounds, the use of technology to empower existing workers and drive efficiencies, outsourcing and working on retaining the staff they do have.
He says the Covid lockdowns exacerbated the problem not only as the number of overseas IT workers dried up, but because overnight people started working from home. This caused demand for technology services to "go through the roof" and placed the IT sector firmly on the back foot.
"Because businesses were needing more technology services with staff working remotely, IT departments began working longer, more stressful hours," he says. "This has led to a lot of burn-out which in itself is a massive problem."
He estimates demand for IT services in New Zealand has grown 300 per cent in the last two to three years while, at the same time, a greater percentage of business interaction is carried out digitally, a legacy of the impact of Covid.
Globally this rose from an average 36 per cent before Covid to around 58 per cent by July 2020 and Sharrocks estimates it has probably grown by another 10 to 15 per cent since then. In New Zealand he believes the percentages may even be higher as companies turn to technology to innovate and grow.
Sharrocks says large numbers of Kiwis are still working from home at least part of the week. A 2021 Cybersecurity Market Research Report commissioned by Kordia revealed a third of Kiwi firms have at least 60 per cent of their staff working from home on two or more days and 43 per cent have at least 60 per cent at home one day a week.
Conducted in September and October 2021, the research came from an online survey of 362 IT business decision makers in New Zealand organisations with more than 20 employees.
More than half of those surveyed said Covid prompted their organisation to adopt a long-term work-from-home policy, while 70 per cent of companies with 200 or more employees did so.
He says the landscape for cyberattack threats has extended as a result meaning IT experts are no longer just protecting the offices people work in, but their homes and places like cafes as well.
"Freedom working (working from home) is both a blessing and a curse, but it is the world we've created and its success will come down to how well companies manage the culture and processes around remote working."
For more information go to: www.kordia.co.nz
