Wellington as a talent centre and the ‘little city that could’

Saturday, 19 April 2025

Alex Matthews is a Wellington business person in the digital production/IT /games sector, an industry experience mentor, and an avid futurist passionate about Aotearoa’s role on the global stage.

OPINION: Industry moves so fast these days that academia often struggles to keep pace with teaching content and skills that are relevant to modern industry. It is a never-ending puzzle that curriculum specialists constantly labour under, especially in fields involving technology.

Keeping education current with industry expectations is paramount, but it is challenging and only getting harder. Yet we need to assume that the rate of change will keep increasing and adapt strategies for now and the future.

From an economic perspective, teaching content and skills that are immediately bankable by students into active careers is the primary metric of how we collectively value our education system.

Not only do learners demand value and accessible jobs for their money in the face of megalithic student loans, quality export education is an important part of our economy.

Being a centre of know-how and competency has historically been an advantageous, core part of our global brand.

Wellington is simultaneously a city of students, academics, artists, business people and bureaucrats. It is a special kind of pressure cooker that fuses different sectors and walks of life into one urban experience.

This is a critical advantage we must leverage to the full extent, and one obvious way to do it is how we structure overlaps between academia, the private sector, local government and communities.

I have previously written about the importance of society embracing long term planning and multi-decade strategies if we want to be successful. I think we need to apply that kind of thinking here.

Engagement between academia and industry happens in so many ways and they’re all important: consultations on circular, business and innovation mentoring, guest speaker series, internships, work experience, special content workshops, co-sponsored events and conferences, scholarships, new businesses formed out of university research projects. The more of these we have working in our city, the healthier it is.

I’ve been lucky to participate in many of these kinds of initiatives over the past 15-plus years in some capacity or another.

Initiatives like CreativeHQ, Taiawa, Gold Awards, TEDx, Vic ICT Grads, Mahuki Accelerator, Young Enterprise Scheme, Venture Up and BizNinja are all programmes that have created enormous value for our economy and many continue to do so.

Start-up incubators, growth accelerators and networks like these bridge divides between sectors and frequently involve stakeholders from academia, local government and businesses.

These programmes experiment with new ideas: finding purchase quickly if they’re solving the right problems at the right time and place.

Collaboration initiatives like these are the modern standard model for urban prosperity, finding innovative applications for new ideas and technologies that drive new businesses and jobs.

I strongly believe that every dollar spent on these programmes provides a valuable return to the economy. While sometimes their outcomes are hard to measure, the sustained commitment to resourcing them is essential to having a stable and fertile ground for the growth of new, high value enterprises.

With the massive gap left in the market by the disestablishment of Callaghan Innovation, we need as a society to value the presence of our local innovation communities more than ever.

Critically, they also expose participating students to immediate access to the cutting-edge development in the private sector - immersing them in the real worlds of business, putting their skills and knowledge to practical use often before they’ve even completed a qualification.

Qualifications that give students best value are ones that are furiously aware of this, always ready to update; constantly making the healthy assumption that they are out of date with current technology and practice trends unless they re-evaluate their curriculum at regular short intervals.

Whereas I used to see skills being taught that I knew were 10 or more years out of sync with the latest trends, with industry experience and internships seen as “nice to haves”, I’m now seeing the reverse. It is very encouraging to see.

Several of Wellington’s most notable tertiary providers appear to be ruthlessly driving the need for work experience, internship placement and direct learning engagement from local businesses on what they consider to be zeitgeist of desired competencies.

However it’s not just about academia staying current: it equally requires engagement from the private sector. Hiring emerging talent right out of tertiary education is extremely valuable for businesses, but for it to work, they have to have boots on the ground and be willing to contribute time to universities and polytechnics.

It’s hard to know who are the rising stars when you’re layers of separation from the classroom, from the business incubators, from the social networks and start-up communities where the sparks are flying.

Business leaders need to be willing to provide internships, be available as mentors, do free speaking engagements, contribute to academic consultations, give their staff time to volunteer, be present and accessible to their local communities.

This is something Wellington is already good at. But we can be even better, and perhaps with enough combined efforts across the board, we can reclaim our title as “the little city that could” - a talent centre where people from all around Aotearoa and the world want to live.