The ill-fated mega-learning institute Te Pukenga – NZ Institute of Skills & Technology was
replaced with 10 stand-alone polytechnics this year, along with eight Industry Skills Boards (ISBs). The Energy and Infrastructure ISB (EIISB) is delivering work-based learning in the extractives and infrastructure sector. By Hugh de Lacy.
Te Pukenga remains only partly operational until the end of this year as vocational education returns to autonomous institutions and industry owned on-job training.
Eight regionally governed Industry Skills Boards (ISBs) now lead standard-setting and qualification development within the country’s polytechnics, which have taken over most of Te Pukenga’s functions, programmes, assets and staff.
Recapitalisation of the system is funded by Te Pukenga’s cash reserves, and the ISBs will manage the existing work-based training during the transition period, while new arrangements are developed across polytechnics, private training establishments (such as MITO and Connexis) and wananga (Maori learning and teaching).
The Minister for Vocational Education, Penny Simmons, says her Government has setup the $20 million Strategically Important Provision (SIP) fund for the 2026 and 2027 transition period. This SIP fund supports courses that are “strategically important to regional and national workforce needs” but may “not otherwise be financially viable to deliver.”
Delivering work-based learning in the extractives and infrastructure sector is the Energy and Infrastructure ISB (EIISB), whose government appointees are Wayne Scott, the CEO of both the AQA and MinEx, and Andrea O’Brien, the General Manager for training at Northland electricity distributor, Northpower.
The EIISB, headed by CEO Philip Aldridge, describes itself as “the caretakers of work-based learning for our industry”, managing training provided by Wellington-based extraction infrastructure training organisation MITO, and Christchurch-based infrastructure training organisation Connexis, who both provide training for a number of other ISBs.
Aldridge advises that anyone currently participating in or considering entering work-based learning should continue to do so. Although there will be changes, he says, programmes will continue to be delivered and every effort will be made to ensure that training and study is not disrupted.
Each Industry Skills Board (ISB) includes one ministerial appointee for a three-year term, and one with a four-year term to ensure continuity.
The Construction and Specialist Trades ISB team are: Gregory Wallace, Tina Wieczorek, David Kelly (Chair), David Fabish, and Paul Hallahan. The CEO is Erica Cumming.
Manufacturing and Engineering has: Nathan Busch, Dr James Neale, Trent Fearnley (Chair), Jamie Lorton, and Ruth Cobb. The CEO is Bill Sole.
The Transport ISB is made up of: Shaun Johnson, Suhail Sequeria, Jennifer Moxon (Chair) and Sherelle Kennelly. The CEO is Samantha McNaughton.
A cautious welcome
Alison Paul, the chair of the NZ Minerals Council and a senior executive at OceanaGold, cautiously welcomes the new system for an extractives industry “poorly served by the current tertiary sector” and which had led to “a heavy, ongoing reliance on overseas qualifications and training [that] would only increase if the training sector gets it wrong.”
Paul says the system should also be “one that allows employers to tell training organisations what training they should be providing, not the other way round.
“Work-based training needs to be effectively delivered across the whole country, without requiring employers to take large swathes of time away from their jobs.
“At the same time the training needs to effectively train. Remote learning and generic unit-standards can only go so far.
“On-site training and integrated employer-led training needs to be part of the mix, as does efficient, consistent recognition of both prior learning and international qualifications.”
She adds that it is good to see extractives included in the EIISB rather than the manufacturing sector “where the skills overlap is significantly less”.
“The whole health and safety framework, post Pike River, is premised on high levels of competency across a myriad of disciplines,” she says, but the formal tertiary sector fails, almost across the board, to provide those training opportunities.
“It is frustrating that mine engineer internships often need to be filled from overseas, and even students and graduates with relevant geology and earth science tertiary qualifications are becoming harder to find.
“On a practical level, NZ unit standard training is the industry benchmark we have aligned to and is industry best practice in terms of compliance for high-risk activity.”
Worker feedback from training that OceanaGold organises externally is that it seems to focus on legislation and enforcement, rather than quality training and safe systems of work.
“This needs to change,” says Paul.
The industry training saga
We can blame the computer for the topsy-turvy evolution of industry skills training since 1992 when the Parliament of the day thought it would legislate a long-term solution to an ever-worsening skills shortage with the Industry Training Act of that year.
It was the first move away from the old apprenticeship system that the country had inherited from Mother Britain and the Industrial Revolution, and which was proving unsuccessful – indeed, it was stifling the emergence of new skills to cope with ever-diversifying trade demands.
It was assumed at the time that the Industry Training Act 1992 would serve for generations, just as the apprenticeship system had, but what hadn’t been taken into account was that new device – the computer and digital software.
The computer revolution hadn’t taken over from the industrial one when the Industry Training Act was passed, but that most spectacular of all technological revolutions occurred over the next decade or so.
The resultant explosion in demand for workers with previously unheard-of skills was fuelled by the simultaneous explosion in the trade and professional niches it generated. As a result, the Industry Training Act, the 50-odd Industry Training Organisations (ITOs) it had spawned and the National Qualifications Framework (NQT) under which they operated, eventually couldn’t cope.
This was becoming apparent by 2010, when a review of the system saw the number of ITOs reduced to just 11 by 2018.
The next big change came between 2020 and 2023 when the Education (Vocational Education and Training Reform Act) came in, creating Workforce Development Councils (WDCs), and absorbing the ITOs into a unified national vocational education body called Te Pukenga NZ Institute of Skills and Technology, It was set up in 2020 as a unified body for 25 polytechnics.
Under education reform by the current Government, through its 2025 Education and Training Amendment Act, this institute body will be gone by the end of the year ear with industry training going back to regional, autonomous polytechnics.