Key Learnings
How we are making a difference
We’ve worked with learners, training providers, council colleagues, employers, procurers, NGOs, tertiary education institutions, local and central government partners, large infrastructure projects, academics, economists, unions, whānau/’aiga, young people and support services to understand what it takes to enable better labour market outcomes. In MPTT, we’ve made some gains to be proud of and gathered lots of learnings in the process.
Women In Industry
Female participation in our construction and infrastructure courses has always been the highest in the country, more than a third of our learners in some years, compared to the national average of just 5%. Across all TSI’s work that touches on male dominated industries, addressing gender-based occupations and industry segregation (and ethnicity) pay gaps is good for both women’s equality and the industries involved.
Our female graduates are in high demand from employers and often excel in their new professions. However, we also noticed that these employment opportunities can add to the complexity in their lives, especially when there are complicated childcare responsibilities and issues such as family harm, and it merely increased the weight of toxic stress. In these circumstances, we also noticed that things tended to derail after about a year into their new employment.
Ensuring an appropriate level of wage or salary to mitigate this is important – it’s not a silver bullet (there are none) but having more money does give women more choices. However, sometimes even this is not enough of a mitigating or harm reducing factor. We’ve also learnt that being exposed to successful female role models in the industry and making it more female-friendly is welcomed and useful but, as a tactic by itself, is not enough to short circuit the situation either.
Quality Employment
We have always been committed to making deep and lasting change over shallow change at scale.
We were the first to make a stand on requiring “quality employment” for our graduates and introduced a wage strategy with their employers, starting at the living wage with intentional salary progressions linked to achieving productivity milestones to reach 10% above the total Auckland median wage within 24 months. Even benchmarking against the Auckland median hourly wage rather than the much lower Māori or Pasifika medians was a relatively unusual concept. This was important for raising the bar of everyone’s aspirations for Māori and Pasifika prosperity.
A couple of years ago, MPTT trialed its own employment brokerage and coaching vs outsourced employment brokerage to test our theory on quality employment and the use of a wage strategy. Over a 12-month period, 233 people were brokered into work; 57% by our own employment brokers and coaches and 43% by outsourced employment brokerage services.
The evaluation showed that approaches prototyped by our employment brokers and coaches (i.e. using the wage strategy, focusing on upskilling and close capability building with both training providers and employers) were effective in obtaining relatively higher starting wages than the generic outsourced employment brokerage. What this showed us was the value of acting with intent and purposefulness in relation to income. This work went on to directly inform Uptempo and Te Taiwhanga Rangatahi as well.
Social Procurement
Partnering with Auckland Transport, we were the first in the country to introduce social procurement and that went on to influence the entire country. However, New Zealand has still to realise the kind of impact seen overseas in using labour market insertions, and much more work is needed in ensuring we have the necessary maturity in both the demand and supply sides to deliver on its full potential.
Serving Māori and Pasifika Employers
MPTT recently moved to the Amotai team so we can support their 680 Māori and Pasifika owned businesses here in Tāmaki Makaurau with their recruitment needs, and potentially create opportunities with the further 1,100 members in other parts of the country. No other Māori and Pasifika business network has its own training arm, and no other Māori and Pasifika training programme is deep inside a business network. Like our procurement work, we’ve got supply and demand all in the same package and are keen to understand what difference this might make.
