This article is an opinion piece by Breccan McLeod-Lundy, Co-Chair of NZRise and CEO of Ackama Limited. 

While the article is Breccan’s opinion he endeavours to reflect the discussions of NZRise members during COVID lockdown in Aotearoa and as we navigate through this ever changing economic climate of the global COVID economy. One area of contention within the NZRise community is that of taxation. 

The ideas proposed in this article are not necessarily the position of NZRise – instead are designed to stimulate discussion. This article has been released as the final part in a 4 part series (read part one, part two, and part three) or is available for download as a single PDF. 

If you would like to join this kōrero please reply to this post or email [email protected] .

Education

Financial Literacy

Many would expect digital literacy to go first in a list of challenges in this list. But I have been consistently shocked by how weak the level of financial knowledge in New Zealand is across the board. This ranges from people’s ability to understand investment or long term effects of their choices through to business owners with weak understanding of their own balance sheets. 

While there is plenty of support for business owners on the entrepreneurship front it constantly surprises me how modern tools like Xero mixed with accountants that happily take care of the day to day financial reporting of a business have made it possible for people to not have a firm grasp on the financial position of their business while mostly being able to carry on trading. Improving financial literacy across the board is to my mind a key part of improving the proportion of attempts at entrepreneurship that are actually successful.

Separately, growing businesses depend on their staff having strong financial literacy. To take an earlier example employee share schemes are only valuable if the people you’ll offer shares to understand what shares are and how they work. Even more importantly, growing businesses rely on being able to hire staff into management roles, from my experience one of the key challenges to hiring for these roles in New Zealand is a relatively low level of base financial acumen even among professionals within New Zealand. 

Digital Literacy

Digital Literacy is much more lacking in New Zealand than most people realise. I include in this topic everything from basic usage of computers and the internet through to an understanding of how systems work in whatever industry someone is part of. Separate strategies are needed across multiple fronts to improve digital literacy across society. Some key groups include:

• Those Suffering from the Digital Divide  – There’s a lot of work happening here which I won’t relitigate in a bullet point but it remains deeply important.

• Government Officials – Many government officials still need additional training to become confident around technology to the degree that is necessary in their roles. This often leads to risk averse choices that have worse long term consequences than a risk aware choice would have led to.

• Governance Professionals – Boards in New Zealand still frequently lack technology expertise or have only a single “tech-savvy” board member. It’s my view that future boards should treat digital literacy more like finance in that all board members should be expected to have basic capabilities and one or more specialists may also be on the board if necessary. The technology sector changes so fast that there is never a single “correct” answer so enough people around the board  table need to be confident enough about technology to create discussion.

• Older Generations – A key part of getting the greatest savings from moving to digital solutions across government is in slowly turning off non-digital solutions. That means we need to provide the right training and access to take people who’ve got used to those processes along with us to the newer approaches. 

• Younger Generations –  Many people assume that younger generations are automatically tech savvy; however, this is steadily becoming less true as modern devices hide more of their internal workings and the algorithms behind them become less intuitive so young people now have less opportunities to understand how the systems they use work. This becomes even more critical as they become more politically active while not able to make strong judgements about what’s actually happening around them versus what’s projected to them by the systems they use.

Vocational education pathways into high-wage industries

At the moment there are plenty of careers where the default study path is university but vocational approaches would also be suitable. For example, at Ackama we’ve hired a mixture of people that have done everything from 3 month programming bootcamps to PhD’s in computer science. On balance, we need some people with deep computer science backgrounds when we hit tricky problems but a good chunk of our work is just not that complex. Most modern startups should focus on delivering the simplest solution to a particular customer problem before investing time in making that solution particularly efficient.

There’s a lot of discussion currently going on in this front for tech. I believe there are three key components:

• Short Entry Courses – Enspiral Dev Academy for instance provide an excellent 3-6 month course that get people up to the skill level necessary to start as a developer.

• Employer Incentives – In any vocational model there is a longer period when someone first joins the industry that they are a net cost to the employer, potential answers here include: training wages, government subsidies, and minimum contract lengths.

• Ongoing Training and Microcredentials – One of our observations of developers coming through Dev Academy or other shorter courses is that some of the content that is left out in comparison to a university course becomes needed later on in their career. A new web developer doesn’t really need to know advanced algorithms and data structures when they join the industry but they would really benefit from that knowledge once they’re trying to become a senior developer and run their own projects. The most motivated people can pick it up over time from books and other training sources but a more complete pathway would be immensely helpful.

Where next?

The tricky thing is to decide what to do next. This post is already long and in no way an exhaustive list. So you might ask, “What should we do first?” Unfortunately, the answer is everything all at once and as fast as possible.

All of these areas I’ve talked about depend on each other. Employers need customers like the government to grow, people need employers to employ them, employers need those people to have the skills to do the work in front of them, and everyone needs the country they’re a part of to be secure and stable.

It would be easy to place this in the “too hard basket” but the reality is the global and domestic impacts of COVID require the private sector and government to work together. We need to break this down into a series of intertwined and interdependent parts, establish a working group to focus on changing the NZ economy so we can adapt rapidly, leveraging our strengths in this new world. 

~ Breccan.

This article is an opinion piece by Breccan McLeod-Lundy, Co-Chair of NZRise and CEO of Ackama Limited. 

While the article is Breccan’s opinion he endeavours to reflect the discussions of NZRise members during COVID lockdown in Aotearoa and as we navigate through this ever changing economic climate of the global COVID economy. One area of contention within the NZRise community is that of taxation. 

The ideas proposed in this article are not necessarily the position of NZRise – instead are designed to stimulate discussion. This article has been released as the final part in a 4 part series (read part one, part two, and part three) or is available for download as a single PDF. 

If you would like to join this kōrero please reply to this post or email [email protected] .