High demand for digital skills, supply is lagging

The tech sector is wasting no time taking advantage of a government plan to support training aimed at expanding the pools of skilled tech workers.

The government’s draft digital transformation plan was focused on building industry collaboration to support growth and training as the main drivers for the tech sector’s development.

In response, global management software firm Salesforce today announced a commitment to train 400 people, with a focus on recruiting Māori into the programme.

Salesforce’s recent Global Digital Skills Index clearly showed that we are in a digital skills crisis and the gap is widening.

“While the demand for digital skills is high, the supply of people with these skills is lagging,” Salesforce country leader Hamish Miles said.

NZTech chief executive Graeme Muller said the push to build a bigger home-grown tech workforce was gaining momentum, with big and small players coming onboard.

“There’s a large number of roles and opportunities for some of these platform players like Salesforce and AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft, where we can actually use the training that they’ve got available and upskill people to have new skills, whether they’re in the sector or other people wanting to transition,” Muller said.

He said the Reform of Vocational Education (ROVE) was also creating more opportunities within the education system to create faster and more nimble processes to bring younger people into the tech sector.

“And then we’ve seen the 600 border exceptions, so there’s recognition that we need to get these higher skilled people in faster.”

The government is inviting feedback on its draft digital transformation plan until the end of the month.

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