Good Settlement benefits Beca
The ever-increasing shortage of trained engineers and technical staff has forced Beca to look offshore for workers.
“The New Zealand market is under-resourced in technical engineering skills, mostly in civil, mechanical, electrical and structural engineering,” says Beca Wellington regional manager Michael Kerr.
“When you’re looking for very specialised skillsets that aren’t typically in New Zealand you’ve got to look further afield.”
As a result, Beca Wellington boasts a raft of different nationalities – in the power engineering team alone 10 of 24 staff are from overseas, in another section five of 15 are migrants.
With a team of 240 in total, Beca Wellington has nearly doubled in size in the past five years and looking to the future, Michael says the company will carry on sourcing workers from abroad as it continues to grow.
At present Beca has recruitment drives in the UK in particular, its most successful market, where it advertises regularly in the appropriate technical journals, takes part in recruitment expos and sends staff over to conduct interviews.
South Africa is another regular target, though current staff are often sent home in an effort to lure others from their previous networks.
“Our employees are fantastic advocates for us, they live here, work here and are happy here. They’ve been through the whole process, so they understand that whatever issues they faced are not surmountable.”
However new employees are recruited, Michael says there are often challenges around language or business culture.
To help, Beca has developed a relationship with Massey University in order to offer one-to-one language tuition.
“The tutor does an assessment first - sometimes it’s more about cultural issues and understanding the Kiwi business culture than language - then she comes back recommending a programme which they undertake,” says Michael.
Another example is the post-graduate training course Beca organised with Auckland University to help get its English structural engineers up to speed with seismic codes.
But Beca’s support starts long before their offshore workers arrive.
“Once we’ve identified a candidate we spend a lot of time getting to understand them and their family, what their drivers are for coming here, their experiences working offshore, even before we start investing effort into actually bringing them out,” says Michael.
“It’s where settlement starts – the first phase is getting them to understand what they’re coming to, selling Wellington warts and all if you like, what challenges they’re likely to face and finding out what their aspirations are in terms of residency.”
If it all pans out, on their arrival Michael says the support (and their family) continues.
“We buddy them up with other workers here who are in a similar situation, whether they be from the same place or same dynamics as in single or with children, we house them in a hotel and provide them with access to information on suburbs so they can look to rent, and we link them up to clubs or organisations they might be interested in to get the social networks going.”
Recent import David Callan can’t sing Beca’s praises highly enough when it comes to the support he received when he and partner Allison arrived from England three months ago.
“We moved out here with our dog and our cat after completing our visa application process in less than a month, including medicals and police checks.
“Beca supported us with organising our relocation, our flights and various queries along the way, including housing when we arrived that could accommodate our ‘zoo’. It really was a painless process.”
For Beca, Michael says the pay-offs from good settlement practice are enormous.
“Not only have the skills we have been able to acquire been instrumental in a period of sustained growth, the key thing is, our new migrant employees have stayed with us.
“When you put this much effort into a new staff member, it’s very important to do all you can to make it a win-win for everyone.”
