Skills crisis looming across the ditch

The PSA update, entitled Discovering the Shortage, was released at the 2012 New Zealand Petroleum Summit in Wellington and says some serious effort is needed to overcome skills shortages in many key occupations within the energy sector.

“Within New Zealand it is not sustainable to head into a period of high skills demand with a strategy that places any reliance on poaching workers from other industries or regions,” it says.

“There is a need to strengthen industry workforce planning to take into account both the new skills demand and the anticipated attrition to Australia.”

The PSA report says the New Zealand oil and gas industry is enjoying a boom period that has led to exploration of potential reserves that were previously considered uneconomic to develop.

The future looks optimistic with the government encouraging exploration and production and providing far greater resourced government departments.

Engineers top the list of likely shortages due to increasing business activity, followed by operators, technical and trades people, then drillers and subsurface professionals.

The industry has an ageing workforce, with an estimated 10% likely to exit the industry within the next 10 years, though there is an opportunity to actively recruit some of these people into part-time training roles before they end their working lives.

“Training via pre-employment and upskilling on the job are critical to the industry’s future workforce supply,” the report says.

“There needs to be more pre-employment pathways into the sector for operations, trade and maintenance roles and industry must increase their investment in training existing staff to move them sideways or upwards within their company to make way for new talent.”

More than half the companies surveyed indicated the majority of staff exiting were being recruited by other New Zealand-based companies, with 30% also indicating some staff were leaving to live and work in Australia.

The survey revealed short-term demand for skilled staff within the Australian energy industry was “substantial” and the threat of skills loss existed even for those who do not emigrate to Australia but utilised fly-in, fly out arrangements.

“The talent challenge is not new to New Zealand … but with ongoing demand for a skilled workforce growing because of industry growth, skills shortages will become larger and more demanding on current resources,” the report says.

“This will be even more problematic should new discoveries be made and [development] projects commence.”

Story courtesy of Energy News