Technology is now the country’s second biggest exporter and is the fastest growing sector. Covid has accelerated the global demand for New Zealand tech which has driven the growth of Kiwi tech exports, NZTech chief executive Graeme Muller says.
The growth is creating many more high-paying jobs for Kiwis. At the same time, Covid has also increased the demand for digital skills for most other sectors as businesses rapidly became more digital.
Muller says in a statement that this is a global challenge with the demand for digital skills outpacing the supply in all countries. Yet here in New Zealand, he says, the supply shortage is exacerbated by a lack of diversity.
“The tech sector has an interesting diversity challenge. In some ways it is incredibly diverse with most tech firms or tech teams in organisations resembling the United Nations.
“For the past 10 years, with not enough graduates coming through the New Zealand education system companies have relied on immigration, bringing in around 3,500 to 4,500 highly skilled IT professionals from all over the world. However, only a few thousand Kiwis graduate each year and very few of those are what you would call diverse,” Muller states.
“To make matters worse, Kiwis haven’t aspired to tech careers and the data is disturbing. NZTech worked with the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment to analyse the digital skills pipeline just before Covid.
“The results published in January 2021 showed that only four percent of tech workers are Māori, 2.8 percent Pasifika and 27 percent female. No data was available for neuro-diversity.”
Muller says the research showed that the challenge starts at a young age, with only 0.5 percent of 12 year olds considering any sort of tech career, ranking tech jobs about number 45 on the list of jobs Kiwi kids are aspiring to…
He says that at high school age the number of students taking subjects that would be a pathway into tech careers has been declining at around one percent compound annual growth rate over the past five years. In 2019, only 1,850 students left high school to start an IT degree. By this stage 24 percent are female, nine percent Māori and six percent Pasifika.
“There are many reasons why we all need to work on addressing this. For a start, with global shortages of people with digital skills it is crazy to leave half of the potential workforce sitting in the benches. Shortages are driving up costs, decreasing productivity improvements and limiting economic growth,” Muller says.
