DIVERSITY
Growing and Strengthening the Workforce through Diversity
Project Description
Identify and understand the barriers for diverse vocational learners entering, progressing and thriving in the sector, with consultation and consideration of priority groups. Reimagine and develop strategies and inclusive career pathways to support a diverse workforce and provide equitable opportunities and outcomes in the workplace.
Benefit to Construction and Infrastructure sector
Enhancing and protecting the mana of Māori, Pasifika and Women in vocational education, will result in the growth, strengthening, and sustaining of the sectors’ workforce, performance, and reputation. Providing tested strategies and career pathways will enable and equip the sector to better support and respond to the needs of a diverse workforce.
Attracting Māori, Pasifika peoples, and women into construction and infrastructure roles is important but understanding how they move through the employment life cycle is critical to socio-economic equality. The success of this project is dependent on readiness for stakeholders, whanau, employers, providers, and employees to acknowledge the opportunity for change, and with that, embrace the changes required to explore a refreshed approach to equality.
The objective of the Diversity Project is to ensure a deep and broad talent pool that utilises all available experience and capability. There is broad acceptance that Māori and Pasifika people are over-represented in the lower-paid industry roles. Likewise, women constitute less than 3% of the construction workforce, and retirees are too often side-lined and their vast experience un-utilised. The Diversity Project will include but is not restricted to, increasing the number of Māori, Pasifika, and Women in trade roles and to explore how these groups can progress to more senior, more highly remunerated roles in the industry.
It is important to note that diversity extends beyond these three important groups. For example, retirees are a group with great potential to impact many people at different stages of their careers. The research will examine diversity from a range of perspectives identified through feedback opportunities.
In the Diversity Project we will research detailed levels of participation at all stages of a lifetime career in the industries, analysed by priority groups, location and job type. This will include the creation of new data sets, and the methods for collecting the data, where robust data does not yet exist.
We will identify best practices for addressing disproportionately low levels of participation at different stages, as well as those without existing best practices. Through consultation, we will develop recommendations for improvements and investment required to scale them up nationwide (or other relevant scale), with an estimate of impact.
This will include recommendations for appropriate long term host/s of the practices estimated, operating budgets, projected impact of implementation on participation levels and a report on high level principles for encouraging inclusivity for the industries.
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