Let's have a conversation about staffing - add your thoughts about the current situation and what the future holds.
Many early childhood services are struggling to find suitable staff.
And if they are not having a problem with recruitment now, they are likely to when a current staff member leaves.
In a poll conducted by ChildForum of more than 800 education people,
90% said in their area that there was a shortage of qualified EC teachers.
Many employers are reporting that they are getting few, if any, suitable applicants for positions.
And we are
losing well-qualified people who are walking away from their career due to safety and wage concerns.
To make matters worse, this is happening at a time when there is a shortage of labour in the NZ economy.
Our sector is
competing with other sectors for potential workers.
According to economists the labour shortage is likely to be around for a number of years.
So acknowledging that, what are your options as an employer and as a service provider?
1. you could beg for more teachers to be trained - but this won’t bring immediate relief.
2. you could believe the govt is going to put a massive amount of new funding into ECE and so the problem is going to quickly disappear – but tertiary education, nurses and school teachers are clearly its priority.
3. you could try recruiting staff from overseas - but the govt is tightening up on working visas and there are strict English language requirements for teacher registration here.
As a business person you may not want to hear this, but until the staffing shortage eases and to reduce staffing hassles a
wise option would be to limit child numbers and postpone your plans to open new services.
Otherwise, one thing you can do is look to
recruit staff from non-traditional sources of labour, such as men, and cover the cost of on- the-job training and course fees.
Keep your current staff by finding out what they want and
come up with solutions that will meet their needs and yours.
A staff member who has school-aged children and is struggling to organise care for them during school holidays could be easily
poached by another service that can offer this to them, unless you can quickly enough find a way to accommodate this need.
Job advertisements are more effective in attracting interest if they offer
what prospective employees actually want.
If you are one of the employers who has advertised that a person working for you will get things like: Fully subsidised healthcare, a uniform and a paid day off on their birthday, paid staff meetings, meetings for appraisal, and non-contact time. Think what this is actually saying about you.
Better than subsidised healthcare would be to make sure you are providing on-the-job training in health, safety and manual handling to help staff, keep themselves safe. You would have read or heard in the media, reports by ChildForum concerning bullying, injury and stress being major problems in early childhood workplaces. How do you ensure staff safety? Prospective staff will be attracted to knowing that you take staff safety seriously.
Providing a uniform or a day off on their birthday may give a prospective employee a sign that the service won’t be a good fit for them as a professional teacher and as an adult who is not a school kid. (consider instead putting that money toward a higher wage, or perhaps a clothing allowance and more annual or sick leave)
Paying staff to attend staff meetings is not a favour, it’s actually a legal requirement.
Likewise giving non-contact time is not a favour, as it is needed to enable paper work to get done.
And staff appraisals are what an employer should be organising anyway.
If your service is located
in a rural area, perhaps an offer of cheap or free accommodation could be just the thing to attract new graduates to apply.
What wage people can get if they work in almost any job other than early childhood teaching is eye-watering in comparison. So if you offer a higher
more competitive wage this will help to attract new staff and importantly retain your current staff. The key message here is that we have a labour shortage in NZ that is also affecting the early childhood sector, and it’s likely to be around for a few years at least.
So as an employer and service provider you must put effort into finding out what exactly current and prospective employees want.