Procuring the skills

In prior posts we covered the first two bullets – funding and building faster and better. In this one we will deal with how to find all the people to do it fast, help our struggling tertiary institutions and upskill our people.

There were few blessings from COVID. Sure, a lot of businesses had an unscheduled digital transformation thrust upon them and they emerged stronger. Not only that, but they learnt that they could in fact make leaps in a short space of time. However, for some of our industries there’s a grim reality, notably tourism and education, which are severely impacted by the lack of foreign visitors and students.

But what if this is a blessing in disguise? What if we take the spare capacity, people from tourism and other sectors – heck anyone that wants to retrain, and the capacity sitting idle in the nations’ educational institutions and started a huge campaign to put the knowledge required in the heads of the people?

Things like on-site assembly which is simpler than stick build. Factory management and production supervision. Automation and robotics. Project management. Cost accounting. Health and Safety management. Supply chain roles. BMI. Digital design. Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. Building Inspection. Consent processing. Legal support. Conveyancing. RMA applications. And so on.

This post is too short to list out all the skills we could train but you get the idea. If we do this in a smart way the skills can be trained all over the land at scale using a mix of digital and existing bricks and mortar, and not just in tall buildings in the metropolitan centres. Training and application can continue in place by supercharging the existing apprentice and vocational training with funds and new technology (like AR).

But who will pay for all this? See the first article in this series. The return will far outweigh the investment.

OK so we have the funds, the methods and the skilled people, but you haven’t dealt with the financial issues I hear you say. Fair enough, see the next article for how other nations have already solved it...