New Zealand Rail: Skills Gap & Future Workforce Strategy

New Zealand Rail Faces Workforce Challenges, Report Identifies Critical Skill Needs

A new report, spearheaded by the Australasian Railway Association (ARA) in collaboration with Hanga-Aro-Rau and sector stakeholders, has identified critical workforce challenges facing the New Zealand rail industry. The report, titled “Building New Zealand Rail Skills For The Future,” underscores the urgent need for strategic workforce planning, investment in skills development, and enhanced sector collaboration. Launched at the ARA’s RailNZ 25 conference in Auckland on May 29, the study, prepared by PwC, presents a comprehensive analysis of the challenges facing rail in New Zealand. The findings highlight skill shortages, an aging workforce, and barriers to attracting and retaining talent, mirroring issues seen in Australia and globally. The report serves as a roadmap for the New Zealand rail sector to build a sustainable and skilled workforce ready to meet future demands. The report’s recommendations will inform strategic decisions around how to address the skills gap and prepare the rail network for a successful future.

Aging Workforce and Skills Gaps

The report paints a stark picture of the current workforce, highlighting a significant skills gap and an aging demographic. The ARA’s 2023 report, “The Rail Workforce: An Analytical Overview,” reveals that a considerable percentage of the workforce is approaching retirement. Furthermore, the move towards digital signalling, automation, and predictive maintenance requires new skills in data analytics, cybersecurity, and digital engineering, presenting future challenges for rail operations. The report indicates a need for succession planning and recruitment strategies to overcome an aging workforce and attract the next generation of rail professionals. This issue is compounded by difficulties in sourcing specialist skills, such as those needed for signalling engineering and traction line maintenance.

Key Challenges: Career Pathways, Training, and Recruitment

The report pinpoints several key challenges, including a lack of clear career pathways, limited education and training programs, and difficulties in sourcing specialized skills. Barriers identified also include limited opportunities for rail-specific tertiary education for rail engineering and operations, as well as limited pathways for career progression. Furthermore, the report acknowledges the competition from other industries and the need to improve the public perception of the rail sector, a factor that hinders recruitment efforts. The report highlights the need for flexible working arrangements and diversity initiatives, particularly for women and Māori and Pacific Peoples professionals, to improve workforce retention and inclusion.

Recommendations: A Three-Pronged Strategy

The report proposes a set of actionable recommendations organized under three key priority areas, all aimed at creating a sustainable and skilled rail workforce. The first focus area is the establishment of long-term foundations for workforce sustainability through infrastructure planning, procurement, and regulatory reform. This involves reviewing and updating the New Zealand Rail Network Investment Programme to ensure long-term infrastructure investment certainty and aligning with broader infrastructure needs. Secondly, the report advocates for positioning rail as a modern, inclusive, and attractive career sector through branding, visibility, and better workforce insights. This includes utilizing platforms like the ARA’s “Work in Rail” platform, establishing consistent workforce demographic data collection, and promoting the ARA’s Professional Certificate in Rail as a trans-Tasman pathway for foundational rail knowledge. Finally, the plan suggests building a future-ready rail workforce through planning, education partnerships, international collaboration, and mobility pathways.

Education and Industry Collaboration

A significant focus of the report is on enhancing educational opportunities and fostering stronger industry collaborations. The study recommends exploring the development of a sector-wide workforce plan that identifies skills shortages and plans for addressing skill gaps. Additionally, it advocates for aligning priority rail skills classifications between New Zealand and Australia to support workforce mobility, skills recognition, and training consistency. The report emphasizes leveraging existing collaborations between the ARA and Australian universities to develop rail-specific modules for inclusion in degree and qualification courses in New Zealand. It notes that collaborating with universities on rail-specialized courses would be useful in terms of cutting down time spent onboarding and training.

Conclusion

The “Building New Zealand Rail Skills For The Future” report provides a crucial roadmap for addressing the challenges facing the New Zealand rail industry. The recommendations offer a clear path forward through strategic workforce planning, investment in skills development, and strengthened collaboration among stakeholders. The report’s emphasis on long-term infrastructure planning, fostering a modern and inclusive work environment, and building a future-ready workforce are essential to maintaining a thriving rail network. Addressing existing and emerging skills shortages will require a unified effort from government, industry leaders, and educational providers. By implementing the report’s recommendations, New Zealand can develop a resilient, capable, and diverse rail workforce. The future success of New Zealand’s rail industry relies on the ability to adapt to technological advancements, attract new talent, and ensure a steady pipeline of skilled professionals, which will create a sustainable rail network for future generations.