The following article by Barry Pett, Chairman of CPIT Foundation featured in the 13 January 2009 edition of The Press
At a time when many organisations are finding commercial sponsorships and trust funding harder to come by, the CPIT Foundation is proactively seeking to fund projects that can fulfil its long-term objective of upskilling young people.
Recent statistics show that unemployment is starting to rise and youth unemployment in particular is rising even faster. At the CPIT Foundation, our aim is to get students to be as employable as possible by the time they complete their course. The Foundation, a strategic partner to CPIT, can fund projects that will make this happen.
Established as an independent charitable trust in 1984, the CPIT Foundation has spent the last few years building a fund that has supported numerous projects, many of them benefiting the wider community. But we can see that many of these would be improved by the involvement of local businesses in a mentoring or support role.
We want to work much more closely with local businesses in future to help reduce the skills gap by identifying industry training needs and then funding projects to meet those needs. Of course, most of those projects will be related to industry training currently offered or that could be offered at CPIT, but we are open to other suggestions too.
For example, we have been working with a local healthcare provider, who has identified a shortage of skilled staff, on the sort of additional training that could help meet their industry need.
And earlier this year, we funded a project that has resulted in the addition of the plumbing trades to regional and national competitions of World skills. CPIT’s Plumbing School at the Sullivan Avenue Campus sent a young plumbing apprentice to the national competitions in Wellington in September and the Foundation funded plumbing and drainlaying tutor Richard Gorrie to attend the Australian World Skills Competition to observe new techniques in teaching and assessment, plumbing materials and plumbing skills.
This enabled Richard Gorrie to take the position of national skills expert in the plumbing trades for World Skills in New Zealand, a role requiring the development of a regional and national project that would be used to find the best plumbing apprentice in New Zealand. He credits the success of these regional and national events to the experience gained during the visit to Australia which was funded by the foundation.
Personally, I believe we need to get back to some of our core values in trade training. It seems that there are courses for almost anything you care to name these days, based on the earlier tertiary training model of getting bums on seats, or Equivalent Full Time Students (EFTS). But in doing so we have ignored the base skills that are still needed to underpin our society and our manufacturers – trades like plumbing and gasfitting, mechanics, engineering, manufacturing and plastics technologies.
In times of a recession, I believe you need to go right back to these core trades to support all the other sectors. New Zealand is still able to compete internationally but only in niche areas where added value by skilled innovative people makes the difference against mass manufactured products.
I would like to see businesses operating in some of these core sectors using the resources of the Foundation to more closely align the skills young people are being trained in, to the skills this community most needs. Traditionally training lags behind the dynamically moving needs of industry and it is only through close communication that this gap can be narrowed.
We’d like to see some applications coming in next year for projects that would bring more of a partnership with local businesses, and in particular with businesses operating in these core sectors. It doesn’t matter how small or how large the project is. Some awards can provide seed funding to help a small project get started. In fact, some of the smaller projects have provided the most value. For example, earlier this year we funded a project aimed at developing resources to help students with low literacy levels at CPIT’s Trades Innovation Institute, and that will have long-running results in years to come.
This past year, the Foundation has also provided significant funding to bring digital technology to CPIT’s practical and vocational training in science and technology, so that students can experience first hand the types of technology they are likely to find when they get a job. Some examples of this include providing software and hardware to allow students at the School of Applied Sciences to conduct dissections via a screen, and high quality patient simulation equipment for students at the School of Health. All these provide a dynamic and interactive situation for students, giving them practical experience they would otherwise be unable to have, but which is absolutely essential for getting a job.
Another technology project involved a mobile phone pilot, enabling hospitality students off campus to be assessed via cell-phone and internet technology.
CPIT Foundation doubled its grants in the 2007/08 financial year (to the end of June) to $428,000, showing a major commitment to furthering practical skills training. However, in the following six months, a reduction in interest rates led to a slightly lower grant round in October.