Nicky Murray
View comments from Nicky Murray, from the NZ Motor Industry Training Organisation, taken at the Literacy Forum in Wellington, May 2011.
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Key content
Nicky talks about gaining traction in up-skilling the workforce using a multi-layered approach, and the need for a long-term outlook.
Transcript
It’s important on several different levels I think. To me, literacy and numeracy is a fundamental human right, we need people who can read and write for them to be able to participate in our society. So that’s kind of the underpinning thing. From a workforce side of things, we need our workforce to be able to productive and to be innovative in their jobs, and literacy and numeracy are underpinning skills to enable that sort of thing to happen.
If we can up skill our supervisors and managers to not be literacy experts, but to understand that there might be a literacy and numeracy issue. Confront their own literacy and numeracy issues and that’s where we start to get some real traction and some spread of upskilling across the workforce, so it’s a multi-layered thing and often the 1st step is getting management and the employers to understand that there might be an issue, that it might be impacting on their bottom lines so therefore they can start to do some thing about it. So it needs to be bottom up and top down as well to be successful I think.
What’s needed now is continuity of funding and I’m not saying more funding because I know that’s not going to happen, but we need security and continuity of funding. We need to take some things that are working well and bottle those up and spread them out across the workforce. We also need to understand that it takes a long time, you cannot go in, sprinkle some magic dust over a workplace and things happen overnight. We’re talking about attitude changes, we’re talking about changes in the way workplaces are organized, we’re talking about upskilling people from management right through to you know front line supervisors so it’s a long time, and that’s why we need the continuity of funding.