Why New Zealand keeps losing its ICT talent

I migrated to New Zealand in 2011, after years as a senior telecom engineer at Pakistan Telecommunications, where I was responsible among other things for the fibre roll-out across the country. I expected the New Zealand ICT sector to be ahead of what I had left. In several respects it was behind.

That surprised me enough that I spent a long time trying to work out why. The answer I arrived at is uncomfortable, and it is not about money or scale.

The white paper

In 2016 I wrote a white paper on last-mile connectivity and design change parameters for Ultrafast Fibre, at the request of its then chief executive. It set out standard operating procedures, scope of works, design approach, service delivery method and the KPIs the delivery teams should be measured against.

The company used it. Working from that paper, Ultrafast Fibre hit its targets for connecting house passes with fibre, and the cost optimisation in it saved a significant sum.

I asked to be hired. I was not. I later understood that the recommendation not to hire came from within the senior management team rather than from HR. I have no documentation of that and I am not making a legal claim about it. I am describing a pattern, and the pattern is the point.

The pattern

New Zealand has a points-based migration scheme that has been very effective at attracting highly skilled IT and telecom specialists. It has been considerably less effective at employing them. Many are underemployed, and a good number are doing work entirely unrelated to what they trained for.

The reason is not that the roles do not exist. It is that hiring managers at large New Zealand firms are uncomfortable hiring senior people whose experience was gained somewhere they cannot readily assess. A CV from a market they know reads as risk-free. A CV describing a national fibre roll-out somewhere else reads as unfamiliar, and unfamiliar gets filtered out.

The consequence is a sector that complains about a skills shortage while declining the skills that arrived.

Why decision latency compounds it

The second problem is speed. Large New Zealand technology buyers are slow to decide, and that slowness is expensive in a way that does not show up on anybody's budget line. Projects that should take a quarter take a year. By the time a decision lands, the technology it was made about has moved.

This matters more now than it used to, because the growth is in areas where being late is the same as being absent. New Zealand is one of the few countries in the Asia-Pacific region where public cloud adoption has genuinely matured, moving past disaster recovery and backup into advanced use that actually drives transformation. IDC has estimated the public cloud will add around one hundred thousand jobs to the New Zealand economy over four years, of which roughly eighteen and a half thousand are skilled IT roles.

That is a substantial opportunity, and it will be captured by the organisations that can move. Most digital transformation work now depends on cloud for scale, for access to AI services, and for reaching digital supply and distribution networks. Developers go where they can build. If the local sector cannot decide at the speed the work requires, the work goes elsewhere and the people follow it.

What ICS does about it

This is not an abstract complaint. It is the reason the company exists in its current shape.

ICS maintains a database of New Zealand resident software and IT specialists and assembles teams for a job rather than carrying a fixed payroll and selling whatever that payroll happens to know. A number of the people on it are exactly the underemployed specialists described above. They are not cheaper because they are less good. They are available because the market failed to assess them properly.

It is also why ICS operates its own switch, its own messaging platform and its own contact centre suite rather than reselling somebody else's. Owning the platform means capability can be demonstrated rather than asserted. When you can publish the concurrent port count and the protocol list, a buyer does not have to take a view on where your engineers trained.

The uncomfortable conclusion

If you are a New Zealand business struggling to find senior technical people, the shortage may be narrower than you think. There is a reasonable chance the person you need is already here, already a resident, and was filtered out of your process by somebody who could not evaluate their background.

That is a fixable problem, and fixing it is considerably cheaper than the alternative.