Farmers were venting their frustrations about the quality of staff they wanted to hire and they couldn’t have been more scathing. While some may sigh and say this is exactly the right way to go about reinforcing stereotypes of agricultural workers being low on skill level and needing to work in the sector because they’re unsuited for other employment, there are many who will look beyond the attention-grabbing headline.
Waikato farmers’ outburst is a mark of the frustration they feel, with the same issue having been brought up just on a year ago at Federated Farmers’ council meeting in Wellington. Their concerns were that while they were told training had taken place for staff, often that simply wasn’t the case when it came to the tasks they wished them to perform onfarm. From the specific examples they voiced it didn’t seem they were being over-demanding when it came to their requirements and the standards they wanted workers to have attained before they set foot on their properties.
It’s hard to make generalisations in an area where there’s so much room for variation. What might be fine for one farmer on one property might definitely not be for another on a similar farm. And it’s well proven that all humans have different rates of learning and ways of accomplishing that process. So what’s really needed is a mechanism by which farmers can be assured that what they’re promised is what they’re actually going to get.
It’s believed that worldwide about 10% of people may be dyslexic and he think there could be over-representation of the condition in the agricultural sector.
And perhaps more importantly, if that isn’t the case there’s ready redress.
The recently appointed chief executive of Primary ITO, Mark Jeffries, was quick to put himself on the front foot when he addressed the Zespri Momentum Conference in Tauranga last week. He was full of ideas, just a few weeks into the job, about how some of the issues raised could be tackled to reach a long-term solution.
And in what will be music to farmers’ ears, he’s talking about a collaborative approach involving staff and resources from a number of different agencies.
“It’s our job to bring synergies across the industry,” he said.
The idea was to merge and consolidate the variety of different training schemes and programmes available at present to prove “end-to-end solutions for business”.
To that end a new strategy will be released in the next few weeks with Jeffries indicating there will be a user-pays component involved.
“We want to leverage conversations in different sectors.”
Starting as he means to go on he said he’d already spoken to new Federated Farmers’ chief executive, Graham Smith about ways in which their two organisations could collaborate more. They intend to meet on a monthly basis to review progress and Jeffries indicated that in future Primary ITO may be making use of the federation policy analysts spread around the country.
This should be welcomed by federation members as a way in which they can have more direct input into what they believe is required and where past structures and the training that’s been set up by them has proved to be unsatisfactory.
Another way Primary ITO believes it could improve what it’s doing is looking at new ways of learning, Jeffries said. It’s believed that worldwide about 10% of people may be dyslexic and he think there could be over-representation of the condition in the agricultural sector. So ways will have to be found to first identify whether the numbers are actually high, then deal with the specific disadvantages when it comes to the process of learning.
Mark Jeffries – collaborative approach coming.
In another scheme, which dairy farmers will applaud, Jeffries talked about developing a workforce capability matrix, which he said would aim to give a simple guide to the experience a worker had behind them. It would give any potential employer a better guide than just a piece of paper showing the courses the applicant had passed without going into specific details. Even better, the matrix is set to be tested out in the dairy industry first before moving on, possibly to the kiwifruit industry, he said.
Jeffries also urged farmers to look further afield when it came to employing workers, looking to take on people for attitude rather than qualifications. Farmers will have no argument with that. For many who have taken on immigrants, career changers or those who have come to dairying later in life, it’s proved to be the best option.
But that doesn’t solve the problem of the huge number of new workers who will be needed on farms in the next few years if agriculture and New Zealand’s export increase hopes are to be realised.
Action is needed fast, and results need to follow.
