Generation Z arrives

RECRUITMENT and talent management firm Hudson says Generation Z is entering the workforce as baby boomers head for retirement.

SPECIALIST recruitment and talent management firm Hudson has released its Great Generational Shift report, which has canvassed the views of 28,000 professionals of different age groups around the world.

Hudson’s executive general manager of talent management, Simon Moylan, said Generation Z was starting to enter the workforce and baby boomers were beginning to retire, meaning all groups moved up a step on the corporate ladder.

“Generation Y are arriving at positions of seniority and are bringing a new management style,” Moylan said. “Generation Y are masters of abstract and conceptual thinking. They are highly ambitious, socially confident and relational.”

He said baby boomers had plenty of traditional leadership strengths — being decisive, motivating, persuasive, strategic, open-minded and innovative.

Moylan said generation X, sandwiched between Y and the baby boomers, were socially progressive and an ambitious driver of change. The traits showed how an organisation could teach workers to work between generations, understand the psychological differences and use what motivates them to drive change.

Rock star’s forum

FORMER rock star Brian Cox will be speaking to Australian students in an online forum about careers in science — particularly physics and astronomy — while on his Making Sense of the Cosmos national tour this week.

Cox was in British band

D: Ream in the 1990s before giving up music and choosing a career in science. He now works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Switzerland, and is a Professor at the University of Manchester.

Cox has also helped popularise science in Britain, as a presenter of several science programs for the BBC. He is hoping to boost the number of students going into science careers around the world.

Schools must register with RiAus for the event, to be held on October 14.

For details, go to: www.riaus.org.au/brian-cox

Kiwis on lookout

NEW Zealand’s government and recruitment company Workhere is hoping to lure IT talent from across the Tasman with its recently launched campaign called The Innovation Islands.

The Innovation Islands website links to a broad range of jobs on offer, profiles the companies that are hiring for tech roles, provides information about their location and features industry news.

The targets are expats and Australians looking for a seachange. The campaign uses successful homegrown businesses such as Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, Xero, Orion Health and ERoad to show what can be done with the right talent.

Immigration New Zealand attraction, settlement and protection general manager Steve McGill said the government recognised the tech sector’s need to attract top talent to grow. “Attracting Kiwi ICT expertise back to New Zealand is important to us, but we also welcome talented Australians and other nationals who are looking for a new challenge to join us across the ditch,” he said.

Workhere managing director Jonny Wyles said the company developed the campaign to give people an idea of what it was like to work in the New Zealand tech industry.

“New Zealand really is a breeding ground for new thinking and today is at the forefront of the industry because of the technologies themselves — software development and cloud-based business models — that make it possible to deliver work from anywhere in the world,’’ Wyles said.

New research boss

THE National Centre for Vocational Education Research has appointed Craig Fowler as its new managing director, replacing Rod Camm.

Fowler has worked in the private and public sectors, including in senior roles with the South Australian public service.

NCVER board chairman Peter Shergold said Fowler had an exceptional depth of understanding of vocational education and training and had a deep sense of the importance of skills acquisition to Australia’s prosperity.

Professor Shergold said Fowler would bring a strong background in research methodology and commitment to the value statistical data could play in informing evidence-based policy.

“His experience will be invaluable, given that NCVER has been tasked with collecting information on total VET activity for the first time,” Shergold said.