By taking a skills-first approach means that businesses get employees with the right skills and competencies for a particular role, rather than getting someone with a particular qualification or job title.
The benefits of this approach include unlocking hidden talent pools, increasing productivity, supporting talent mobility and redeployment, and promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.
The Skills Framework is a visual representation of the skills required for the food and fibre sector, infused with Te Ao Māori, explicitly using and prioritising Māori understanding of areas such as sustainability and wellbeing, and can be enhanced over time as future skill needs are realised.
The Skills Framework will contribute towards creating education products that maximise flexibility and transferability, while remaining meaningful to industry and allowing opportunities for specialisms.
The framework helps to provoke conversation, allows employers to recognise skills and identify areas or qualifications that need further development.
The key parts of the framework cover the following areas:
The project has developed a range of recommendations that will be investigated more thoroughly throughout 2024. A subsequent research report and presentation was completed that looked at the knowledge and skills learners in Primary Industries are getting through their qualifications.
Check out the online Food and Fibre Skills Framework, which makes it easier for employees, employers, and educators to access and use.
A case study titled ‘A Skills-First Career Mapping Approach’ explores the integration of the Skills Framework to highlight career pathways within the food and fibre sector. Initiated by Muka Tangata, this project involves collaboration with industry experts to develop industry-specific career pathway maps and adopt a skills-first approach to workforce attraction and retention. The methodology incorporates industry roles, skills data, the Skills Framework, and skill clusters. To validate the approach, interactive online sessions were conducted, which refined the mapping of roles and skills into cohesive clusters. The data collected from these sessions were analysed using Power BI to create a comprehensive ‘Careers Dashboard’.
A second case study is being developed currently. This will look at how an Industry body working with an education provider, used both the Skills Framework and the Principles-lead Leadership Model to design a tailor-made leadership training programme for their industry.
In addition, the CoVE is co-ordinating discussions about how the development of skill standards and qualifications can better integrate Transferable Skills, across all the WDC and NZQA Qualifications teams. As part of this project, an analysis of existing standards and qualifications, and the existing situation was completed. The Situation Report provides a summary of what is working, and what could be used to improve the development of core skills in our workforce.
Dr. Nicky Murray (On Task Ltd), Kathryn Koopmanshcap (Boost Business Services) with support from HTK Group
Jackie Lynch, Portfolio Manager
Our Project Showcase is being updated over time. In the interim, go to Knowledge Base to see a full list of projects.
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