I've posted before on the future-of-work subject in "At a crossroads" and "Notes from the Digital Rust Belt", and the threatened obsolence of my current skillset. The latest is that NZ Inc is starting to realise that credentialism is counter-productive, with a recent open letter. I wonder if the populist waves in America and Britain over the past year & a half have been a wake up call to do something.

The open letter says, "One place that you will be able to find these jobs is on the Trade Me Jobs site, with a clear indicator that no tertiary qualification is required to apply." I've just had a look there, and even though the jobs advertised don't need formal quals, there's a catch: the positions are mostly senior roles that still need "X years of the right experience in a formal role" - in other words, fully assembled and ready to operate out of the box. Which basically rules out most gig economy work - in my case, piecemeal test analysis projects.

If the signatories to NZTALENT want to back up the hui with do-ey, maybe they should hire apprentices like they do in the Rhine (Germany, France, Benelux) and Nordic (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland) regions of Europe, where apprenticeships and other forms of training are a public good rather than a perishable good. And apprenticeship training is overwhelmingly the best approach for those at risk of technological unemployment, insufficient/outdated experience or otherwise requiring "some assembly required" - I'm just like the 45-year-old truck driver in that Economist article, but instead of driving trucks I fix PCs.

But as the Summer of Tech people have mentioned on Twitter, an ICT apprenticeship system in NZ faces big hurdles. Under current rules, apprenticeships have to go through an ITO or tertiary provider with formal quals to get funding, ICT employers don't trust the current NZQA framework to provide the required vocational skills, and the skills goalposts shift quicker than the NZQA can officially recognise them. Successive tertiary education ministers have fobbed it off as a solution looking for a problem, instead insisting that there's no alternative to university.

Fixing the skills mismatch in NZ isn't going to come cheap. And yet it would be unaffordable if those in a position to fix the problem did nothing. How unaffordable? Unaffordable enough for loudmouth demagogues in Washington and London to steal a march.