Christchurch high school students recently tried out a day in the life of a City Care worker as part of a nationwide drive to encourage teenagers to embark on a career in trades and services.
Students from Shirley Boys and Kaiapoi High Schools visited City Care – a major player in helping rebuild Christchurch’s infrastructure after the earthquake – for a look into water reticulation work and an insight into how to deal with the likes of burst water mains and flooding.
The students were part of group of 750 students in Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington and Christchurch who on Tuesday joined the ‘Got a Trade? Got it Made!’ Big Bus Tours 2016 which visited 50 workplaces to see what trades and services careers and on-the-job learning is all about.
Sectors on show included manufacturing design and engineering; civil engineering; specialist trades; automotive technology, repair and engineering; social and community care; sales and service; sign-writing; mining and industrial machinery and construction and infrastructure – to name a few.
Got a Trade chair, Andrew Robertson says, “We wanted to promote the many opportunities that exist for on-the-job learning and apprenticeships, across as many sectors as we could, in one day.”
The Big Bus Tours are part of Got a Trade’s campaign in response to the growing need for more young people to enter trades and services roles across New Zealand. For example looking forward to 2020 the civil engineering sector will need 19,600 new people, and in the manufacturing sector, that figure blows out to 40,000.
Connexis CEO Helmut Modlik says, “Connexis is proud to be a driving factor in Got a Trade, Got it Made which is making considerable headway encouraging the youth of New Zealand into a career with a promising path. A key element is the on the job training which allows young people to not only work and be paid but to learn as they go resulting in a credible qualification.”
The campaign is a joint consortium of forward-thinking Industry Training Organisations – Connexis, BCITO, Competenz, HITO, MITO, ServiceIQ and The Skills Organisation. Collectively they represent more than 120,000 learners and 10,000 employers across 100 industry sectors.
To find out more about Got a Trade go to: www.gotatrade.co.nz
