Spread your skills across the workplace

By ADAM GIFFORD

The New Zealand workplace can be challenging for many new entrants or migrants. They may have deep understanding of a particular application or technology set - such as Photoshop for image manipulation or Illustrator for drawing charts and graphs - but they find when they get into the workforce that such specialisation isn't always appreciated.

Employers want people who can do more than one thing well as organisations are often not big enough to carry uber-specialists - in short, computer users need to have a Swiss Army Knife mentality to software applications and programs.

David Palmer, managing partner with Alliance IT Recruiters, says expectations are different.

"If you have a broad skill set, people will say they want a .Net developer with strong C

skills, but there may be only one in the organisation, so they want someone who will carry the whole area," Palmer says.

"The expectation is you won't have as much responsibility but you will have broader responsibilities, in the sense of making more decisions.

"If you are doing a roll out of a major system in Britain or South Africa, chances are it has tens of thousands of employees and millions of customers.

"I had a guy who had done a roll out for a shoe company with 150 branches, and his job was to go into each branch and do a specific part of the set-up.

"Here, such a company might have branches in Auckland, Tauranga and Wellington, and the same person might have to do every last bit of the roll out."

Palmer says because organisations are smaller, they want people with skills already, rather than taking the time to train them.

"It looks greedy, but that is small business reality - they don't have money for training."

He says much of a recruiter's work is managing expectations, getting people to realise they may have to spread their horizons if they are to get and keep a job.

"It usually takes two years for someone from overseas to get established and settled," Palmer says.

"New Zealand candidates do tend to have a more general range of skills [than most migrants], because if something needs doing, they get in and do it."

Palmer says the accelerating pace of technology also affects the workplace.

"The position of Chief Information Officer makes a big impact. In some organisations CIO no longer stands for that but for chief innovation officer instead.

"Almost every person in a business will be touched by IT, right down to the warehouse guy picking stuff off the shelves."

Many candidates seek extra skills before putting themselves on the market.

Paul Walker, regional manager of Computer Power Institute, formerly Spherion, says his organisation tries to introduce students to a broad range of skills, including desktop applications, more specialised applications, networking, development environments and soft skills such as team building, project management and customer service.

"These things can be equally as important as IT," Walker says.

"Years ago, you might have been able to get a job in IT with just programming skills. Now programmers are more likely to work directly with the business or customers, so you need more business acumen and social skills."

He says there aren't the sort of large industry groupings here which allow people to be focused on one sector.

"A lot of the employers taking our graduates are smaller organisations, so they can't take people who are too specialised."

Tony Skelton, the general manager of Ace Training, warns New Zealand's "can do" culture could leave it struggling as technology gets more complex.

He says the sector has tended to reward people who are good at shortcuts and workarounds, rather than requiring people to develop a deep theoretical understanding of their particular niche.

"My concern is this country is not producing enough fully certified IT professionals," Skelton says.

"On one hand, corporates tend to cherry-pick the training and educational requirements for staff, and on the other hand the requirements from the Tertiary Education Commission are flawed when it comes to applying tertiary funding to the ICT sector."

Ace does not run TEC-funded programmes, preferring to give its students internationally recognised qualifications.