Declining Investment, Shrinking Talent Pool. Over-Reliance on Imported Talent. The Untapped Potential of a Skilled Domestic Workforce. All isights from Toi Mai’s workforce development plan for digital technologies. I pose the argument for why we need to take this as seriously as government has taken the shortage of construction workers in recent years.

Now’s a good time to think to the future, to the growth times that will no doubt come, and the tech skills, AI or otherwise, that will help you make the most of them.

Upskilling and reskilling, growing our home grown talent alongside imported talent acquisition - are all needed to grow our sector and improve the productivity of our economy.

A small group of Wellington based ITP members got together this week and discussed concerns for our economy, the industry and especially the capital.

Why do we have a diversity problem in 2024?

“There is an obvious gender imbalance in STEM study choices in our country with female students dropping from 41.5% in Year 12 to only 19.8% in higher (tertiary) education. Postgraduate and Masters/PhD show an even more dramatic decrease, with only 4.6% and 2.4% of women respectively.”

An IT Professionals student member asked me how they could get started learning about Testing over the holidays so I took the question to our members on their slack channel and this is the advice that came back.