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Skills & Talents two: partnering to meet the skills needs

Key points

Four key principles of partnership working:

1. all parties want to be actively involved;
2. all parties should contribute and be listened to within the partnership;
3. the partnership must have mutual benefit to all the parties involved; and
4. all parties must have ownership and responsibility for outcomes.

• Partnerships will evolve and must adapt over time.
• Issues over increased bureaucracy and accountability as programmes are developed.
• Partnership working is not easy and has to be worked at to gain mutual trust and benefits.

New role for government in this area:

• partnership with local industry to understand labour market demand and to develop a demand led approach to provide targeted support;
• engagement - to facilitate joint agency responses to local priorities and needs to ensure that skills shortages and local labour market issues are responded do through a co-ordinated approach; and
• facilitate the development and creation of labour market opportunities at local level and ensure the flexibility to meet the changing needs of the labour market.

Important considerations:

• The need to reduce the duplication of effort by co-coordinating a single response by local agencies to identify opportunities and respond.
• The ability to adapt to the changing needs of the labour market and to assist communities to deliver projects.
• The development of a proactive approach working closely with industry and relevant tertiary and education providers to meet industry needs.
• Demand led approach to ensure that skills delivery effectively meets industry needs to increase efficiency and increase firm productivity.
• The need to develop flexibility, drawing in new partners as required, to actively respond to industry needs.
• Industry driven and partnered demand led approach to leverage in resources for programme development.

Developing and maintaining effective partnerships:

• Collaboration and partnership working is challenging. It often takes longer than anticipated and often takes you outside your funding envelope.
• A shared vision is crucial to success and there must be shared ownership of the vision, as well as commitment, energy and sustained shared vision to make the partnership work.
• Identify areas for collaboration in line with the vision.
• All parties have shared accountability for success for the partnership.
• The use of trade association and industry bodies to facilitate assistance with relevant agencies to ensure that migrant qualifications can be utilised to the best effect, particularly, in areas where there are recognised skills shortages.
• MSD Work and Income recognises the need to enhance opportunities for migrant and refugee clients to achieve sustainable employment. A number of initiatives are utilised to promote opportunities, for example:
  • Migrant and refugee co-coordinators and specialized case managers;
  • "Migrant job link" intensive job search programme;
  • Community migrant centres with WINZ job placement staff; and
  • Collaboration initiatives with: Auckland Regional Settlement Strategy, inter-agency and territorial local authority settlement focused; inter-agency Migrant and Refugee Network and referrals via the Chambers of Commerce network.
• A "one size fit all" approach will not meet the needs of all individual partnerships.
• Potential partnerships need to recognise that in adopting a model there needs to be flexibility in terms of what they may wish to do and the type of delivery mechanisms that are utilised.
• Need to develop a demand led skills shortage programme which required a clear understanding of industry needs. This required the partnership to effectively engage with SMEs, trade associations and education providers to develop a demand led approach.
• Engagement is clearly a challenge, but the effective use of industry trade associations can assist in accelerating business engagement particularly when businesses can see how skills programmes can effectively assist in improving business performance.
• There is little doubt that initiatives must be demand led to ensure that the rights skills are developed to meet industry needs.
• There are issues around the way work based training and tertiary provision is funded to facilitate and promote greater partnership engagement between industry and training providers.
• Effective partnership engagement with relevant industry stakeholders and businesses should be able to identify the gaps that require addressing.
• Needs to be good analysis and statistics to provide the relevant evidence base to support appropriate programme development backed up with relevant and robust industry studies to provide the most comprehensive picture as possible.
• It is crucial to maintain the shared vision of the partnership and to develop and implement processes to support the shared vision. The partnership must recognise it will evolve over time and it will need to adjust its forward plan to take into account that new partners may come on board as well as existing partners leaving.