Report time – INZ Permanent & Long Term migration pt3
Filed under: Getting to New Zealand, Hubby's Views, Jobs & Work, Life in New Zealand
Last one out turn the lights off please.
The patterns part of the report again makes for some interesting reading and good analysis by DoL. Emigration & Immigration are both cyclical, effected by similar drivers and so on. An easy example is that when the exchange rate improves, immigration goes up. Those of you considering the move will know this yourselves as you deal with the lousy amount of NZ$ your currency will buy now. Many people simply cannot afford the move with the rate as it is. When the rate improves, more people can afford to move here.
The analysis for 2011 makes for stark reading.
Net migration for 2011 – 3,900.
Although I’m not surprised by that. With Christchurch being such a popular destination with Brits, throw in a couple of earth quakes and people think twice about emigrating in the first place. Plus there’s a big jump in Kiwi’s heading out of Christchurch to start afresh somewhere.
For the first time, we’ve got some good analysis of migration of Kiwi’s to Aus & elsewhere.
So while we have a big increase in Kiwi’s heading off to Aus in the past six years, compared to the preceding six years, we’ve have almost the same number of Kiwi’s fewer heading to places other than Aus.
DoL are keen to emphasise the big picture, that this is a cycle and so on. The statistics are being effected by Christchurch and NZ’s general economic outlook, whether we can pull out of the cycle as expected will be the interesting thing.
Report time – INZ Permanent & Long Term migration pt2
Filed under: Economics, Hubby's Views, Jobs & Work, Life in New Zealand, Property & General Investing
The contribution of Kiwi’s abroad to the NZ economy.
One of the interesting stand out comments in the DoL exec summary refers (again) to the Kea research. DoL cite this as “New Zealand’s diaspora is significant and our expatriate community is seen as an important contributor to New Zealand’s economic prosperity“.
Hmm, that sounds like a sound and solid contribution to the economy.
Only the Kea report cited doesn’t actually say that.
Kea talk about the potential for rich Kiwi’s living abroad to invest back in NZ.
They do identify that some of these rich folks are doing that already, but that there is huge potential for more investment from Kiwi’s who no longer live here.
Page 8 (section 3) of the Kea report makes for some fascinating colourful graphs. Although it is based on the assumption that listing on a stock exchange and having public share ownership must be a good thing and is the only way to run a successful company. Not an entirely fair and reasonable presumption. I know of quite a few world leading and competition beating companies that are entirely privately held.
It also assumes that Foreign Direct Investment (people abroad investing in your country) is a good thing too. Oh, right. Let’s just ignore all the FUD tub thumping about the Crafar farms sale then shall we. Foreign Investment in NZ is a bad thing, it must be. All those foreign types! We can’t possibly sell them bits of New Zealand! We will be ruined!!
FDI to NZ in 2010 is quoted as being $600m, while the Overseas Investment Office who approve who can buy NZ land maintain some interesting monthly stats.
2011 will be a bit better, thanks to James Cameron 
Not many people seem to mind him directly investing in New Zealand. But then he doesn’t look “foreign”. And he makes fun movies. So he’s alright.
The Kea report makes for fascinating reading, especially the theme’s that companies need to address if they’re looking for investors. Time for a sit down with a cup of tea, pen & paper to make some notes.
IT jobs, as easy as falling off a bike?
Hopefully you spend it ‘on stuff’ that the business needs.
IT is of course particularly attractive as there’s a shortage of good IT people to do all the things that NZ businesses need their IT folks to do. Lots of Kiwi IT folks head off to Europe to get ‘more experience’, or to Australia to get access to more opportunities, or promotions etc. So in general there’s a brain drain of experience from NZ IT circles. Although the latest INZ study claims there is no such thing as a brain drain, and I get their point, what they’re not saying is that those with in demand skills are leaving – just as much as those with general skills. So they’re right, there isn’t a specific brain drain, it’s just a drain.
A random IT qualification does not equate to either experience or practical skills, nor does it guarantee you a job in any country. Employers are actually looking for specific IT qualifications and experience, with the qualification matching the experience. The big issue here is that there are an awful lot of careers that come under the general heading of “IT”. Where you YOU fit in that huge melting pot? Do you have a general “IT Diploma” or do you have specific networking or software development skills? Are you an architect or a field services engineer? Make sure the qualifications you do have match your experience.
Now, some companies in the IT industry are indeed guilty of promoting various qualifications as being the golden keys to a fantastic & well paid career in IT. Only the qualification they are promoting is the administration equivalent of being qualified to open a letter, or perhaps put letters in the post box.
Unfortunately while most IT qualifications are applicable world wide, almost none of them are officially NZQA recognised. One exception is that CCNA is recognised as being NZQA Level 3, making it a secondary school level qualification.
So despite spending years pursuing these IT qualifications, if you don’t have a University degree (a Bachelors degree is NZQA Level 6 or 7) they count for bubcuss in the immigration process. The official line from NZQA being that none of your study is likely to have been either full time or for at least three years.
When I think about how much I learned in my first three years in an IT company, practical experience, mistakes, being taught by different people who all had years more experience than I did. Doing some three year degree in computing science would have been a complete waste. IMHO.
Not that IT degree’s really existed when I was at Uni. And my brother seven years later was learning the basics of ethernet & TCP/IP only in his third year at Uni!! So it’s nice to see some practical IT qualifications filtering their way below University degree’s into the mainstream school curriculum now.
Getting the right qualifications, a the right time in your career is vital. Enough to stretch yourself and learn something new, while also validating some of your existing experience. Also something that is the sort of qualification needed for the role you want to be doing in a couple of years. Give it a year, you have the qualification, some more relevant experience and you can start applying for ‘that’ next career move. Easy eh?
Of course not. You need to polish the CV, find a mentor, get a few {practice} interviews for that job of the decade you really want but don’t have a realistic hope of getting. Polish the CV some more and then you’re ready for the next job of the decade that comes along. Look at other CV’s, if they are better than yours, copy them. Although you shouldn’t lie or plagiarise someone else’s achievements.
Don’t fall into the trap of just thinking your CV is something you send out to people when you want a job. You need to keep it updated, and impressive. I’m on V8.3. of my main CV. That is how often it gets updated. I also have a second CV of recent projects. I was thinking of changing the versioning to align with the year and month (it would be 12.2 now), but Microsoft have already stolen that idea and I didn’t want to be accused to plagiarism.
And then there’s the voluntary work for the IT community. A great way to meet people and ‘network’ in the social sense. Other than having drinks down the pub after work. I’ve been a slow convert to LinkedIn and networking in person as a whole. I’m looking back at what I might have achieved if I’d done the whole networking thing properly years ago. Instead of assuming that my good work spoke for itself.
People often measure your success and make comments like “it’s easy for you” or “it’s all right for you”, as if I’ve got some magical or Jedi power. I wish I had. Imagine Alec Guinness saying ‘press the donate now paypal button on Avalon’s website’.
No success comes without hard work, I remember one particular occasion taking a 3 hour drive into London at 8pm on a Friday evening. Avalon sitting in the passenger seat reading out practice exam questions, as final prep for the six hour exam I was due to take at 9am Saturday morning.
Of course, that was easy compared with how long it took Avalon to teach me how to use the off button on the mobile phone. That took a lot of practice, more than a few reminders, various ‘discussions’, practical demonstrations – you get the picture.
No job in IT is easy. Certainly not the types of job that pay $100k+ and are in high demand in NZ. But then I don’t suppose that is the case in any industry. If you do start in IT, you’ll at least have a broad range of career options ahead of you.
For me now; time to get back to some IT related study, polish the professional profile, respond to emails from potential clients. All in a days work. On a long holiday weekend.
Easy eh?
What are Fletcher’s playing at?
Fletcher Building is one of New Zealand’s largest companies. They are cutting hundreds of jobs, across Australia and New Zealand.
Speaking after the company’s annual general meeting in Auckland today, chief executive Jonathan Ling said the job cuts were ”significant”, although its total workforce globally comprises around 20,000 people. He didn’t know the exact number of redundancies, but said there had been a ”few hundred” job losses in Placemakers here and across the Tasman, 22 in Wellington construction and a further 200 job losses in Australia across the board.
Ok, so sometimes this is unavoidable. There is a recession, and because house sales are affected quite badly, and lending has dried up for people t0 buy, build or renovate I guess it’s not a huge shock. What is a huge shock is:
Meanwhile, the board today sought shareholder approval to increase the pool of directors’ remuneration by $500,000 to $2 million per annum
Now this is what I would call an “Occupy Wellington” moment.
How the hell can any company claim it has to make job cuts while at the same time wanting to use $500,000 of the saved money to pay the bosses. That is just wrong.
They make some excuses for why they should be allowed to do this, and apparently had 90% votes in favour via Proxy Votes (from experience that seems to amount to shareholders signing to say the fox gets to take charge of the hens). I’m all for high pay for good staff.
But I think it is just sickening that this is still going on, and at a time when there should be a spotlight on this kind of behaviour. Bottom line – if the company has $500,000 going spare every year for directors pay increases, it should use that to keep more staff on.
Immigration equality
Since April 2011 British immigration rules have tightened up. Kiwi’s, Aussies and other Commonwealth countries that have previously enjoyed very favourable immigration status in the UK, are being put on a more measured footing. While as Brits emigrating to NZ or Australia there’s a limit on the number of places, we have to demonstrate our worth and in most instances have a job to come to (or stacks of cash), the same hasn’t been the case if you were a kiwi heading to the UK.
So what’s different if you’re heading to the UK?
Well, for a few years now you’ve needed to apply for a visa anyhow. It’s not been granted ‘as of right’ when you show up at a UK airport fresh off the long flight. At the time, the requirement to get a photo taken for your new visa was predicted to kill off all and any OE’s & working holidays to the UK. Only it didn’t. And the new rules will have a similar effect, people will just work with them.
Existing visa’s granted on the basis of ancestry are unaffected. It’s just those people coming to the UK who wont be on a temporary (albeit two year long) working holiday visa, will now have to jump through similar hoops that Brits coming to NZ do.
So now, prospective kiwi’s wanting to spend 2+ years in the UK working will have to have skills. Plus a job offer from a legitimate company for a job that is in high demand in the UK. And they’ll need to apply early as there’s an annual cap of approx 20,000 places available. And the job will probably have to have been advertised across the entirety of Europe for anyone there to apply ahead of you.
Sounding familiar?
Now, there’s a lot of Kiwi & Aussie interests who are crying foul about this. Yet, I don’t see an issue with it. Although this sort of system is never going to solve the domestic problems the UK has due to immigration – with 350 million+ Europeans having the right to enter the UK and apply for any job, limiting the potential for 25 million Aussies+Kiwi’s to enter the UK isn’t going to prevent an overwhelming flood.
Sure it means Kiwi’s & Aussies might be more likely to only stay for two years. Surely that’s a good thing though?
NZ & Australian Govts. spend a lot of time and money encouraging ex-pat kiwi’s & Aussies to return home. They have skills the home country needs, there’s loads of jobs etc. So while these people have gained valuable European working experience, <rant on> which somehow never translates into better salaries once you return home mind you because none of that is suddenly apparently relevant to the home market <rant off>, suddenly bringing these people home to share their skills & experience is an unfair thing?
Compared with the UK, neither NZ or Australia have a significant unemployment problem. Sure there are certainly groups in all societies who have higher unemployment than average. The social engineering that is UK immigration policy is much bigger than simply unemployment.
Compare & contrast; in Wellington we have a few dozen people peacefully camped out as part of the ‘Occupy’ movement. While in London a few months ago you had thousands of people rioting and pillaging for nights on end. While there’s no excuse to steal stuff from the One Pound shop (read $2 shop), it reflected discontent, inequality, general grievances with the ‘system’ and the Government. And at last count there were hundreds of people camped out in front of St Paul’s cathedral in the heart of London.
We’ve got it good. We don’t really appreciate how good. Whether that’s in NZ, or as Kiwi’s heading to the UK even under the new immigration rules. Let’s just get on and make the most of what we’ve got.
Six figure jobs
The Seek job search website has (finally) followed TradeMe’s lead and now have a ‘jobs paying over $100k‘ category . This is said to be in response to the large increase in the number of positions attracting those salaries, although all the numbers I can find quoted are only percentages, so it can be a bit tricky checking the real picture.
The largest slice of the currently advertised positions are in their IT category {148/3152}, followed by Engineering {359/3152} in quite a distant second, with accounting (285/3152) also placing. In comparison TradeMe are currently listing 554 IT jobs, out of 1332 in total with a $100k+ salary.
Now, the real picture is a bit smaller than this. We’ve mentioned before about potential overlap in advertising for ‘the job I’m leaving and the job I’m going to’ distorting the apparent figures. Also, some positions have multiple different advertising slants. The difference between a consultant, architect or IT specialist can sometimes be nothing beyond the advertised job title. So agencies try different headlines hoping to catch your eye. So don’t be surprised to find the same job description for a wide variety of different job titles.
Plus numerous positions are being advertised with multiple agencies, so it can pay to dig around and pick which agency to apply through if you fancy one of these positions. Often you will find that the actual recruiting company is also advertising the same role via Seek or TradeMe.
While the agencies will of course tell you that you stand a much better chance applying through them, experience shows few agents actually add value (there’s a shock!). The ones that will are normally the agents who have worked with you previously – perhaps in placing you in your current role. When it comes to interviews, the recruiting agencies should be able to help you out with the nuances of who is interviewing you, company values etc. more than a simple perusal of the companies website. Set against that, good personal networks should be able to give you better information.
At the end of the day if you apply directly, it can mean that the hiring company saves $20k+ in ‘recruitment’ costs. Money that would otherwise be paid to the agency as a success fee. There’s certainly a few decisions, which while they’ve not only rested on that factor, have certainly swung in the direction of a direct applicant rather than a recruitment agency referral because it saves that $20k.
(Don’t expect of course that you will be seeing the $20k!)
Employee goal setting…
Really gave me a good laugh this morning. I am thinking maybe I should set some work goals for Hubby, on which would be determined whether or not I pay him a bonus.
I wonder how well that would go down?
Yes – you do have to pay yourself a fair wage.
The supreme court has now decided that self employed people like us cannot use trusts and various business structures to artificially lower our salaries and thus pay less tax. Not that we have ever done that - we always seem to end up with scrupulously above-board accountants who insist in keeping us on the right side of the tax man. On the one hand that can sometimes be a bit annoying as we watch other people making claims that we are denied. On the other hand we can sleep easy knowing that in the event of a tax audit we have nothing to worry about.
I have seen the devastation that can be caused by bad accounting advise leading to a massive tax bill you can’t pay, and I never want to be in that position.
So what has the court decided?
..the Supreme Court has ruled that company and trust structures cannot be used to artificially reduce taxable income from “personal exertion” – a catch-all definition for the work that professionals and small businesspeople do.
So really – nothing different that what we already do. Hubby “earns” the money that comes into our business – so he gets paid the majority of that as a beneficiary income. A good portion is already taken up with business expenses, so he doesn’t get all of it, and i get a small amount for the bookkeeping work I do. Really I should get paid more, but right now the business is still growing, so we are retaining funds.
The decision was the latest in a string of court victories for the Inland Revenue Department, which are significantly recasting the legal and accounting professions’ understanding of what constitutes tax avoidance.
So even though in this case, we aren’t going to end up in the crap, the IRD are tightening up all over the place. This is where it pays to have a good but cautious accountant. While I hate paying more tax that I need to, paying less than I need to is just too big a headache to contemplate.
”The decision is helpful in pointing to some cases where avoidance would not be involved, such as the need to retain funds to make capital expenditure or where the company is experiencing financial difficulties or it would be imprudent to pay a market salary.
“As a practical matter it will be necessary for Inland Revenue to issue further guidance along these lines because it is in everyone’s interests for there to be reasonable certainty as to where the boundaries lie,” he said.
I should say so. We do seem to have a huge issue at the moment with the IRD not having to stick to it’s own understandings of the rules. There is no hard and fast rule, and the IRD have a massive amount of power (and unlimited funds) to use the courts to enforce a ruling. Even if they have previously written to you and advised you differently.
Tax – not for the fainthearted!
Over 1,320 jobs paying over $100,000 in New Zealand
Back in May 2009 (jeeze I’ve been blogging too long!) I posted about the fact that there were 735 jobs listed on Trade Me with salaries quoted over $100,000. That number has nearly doubled.
Now there’s actually 10,355 jobs currently listed on TM, which means that the proportion of high paying jobs is actually down ever so slightly from 14% to 12.7%. But IT and then Engineering are still the most likely jobs to get you the bigger bucks. The proportion of High Paid IT jobs in Wellington is also down slightly – at 36% of the total IT market.
And it should be remembered that just because a company in New Zealand lists a job as paying over $100,000 it does not mean that this is the salary they will end up wanting to pay you. So just be wary.
Why exactly should interest rates have to go up?
I just do not get this. There was a piece on the news last night about the large and rapid increase in the cost of living over the past year. This means inflation goes up (which just tracks how much prices have risen). Which means that interest rates should go up. Because that will apparently curb our spending and bring the rate of inflation down.
Except that the costs that are going up are food, power and petrol, as well as the luxuries. (A flat white will often now cost $4.50 whereas you used to be able to get one for $3.50 or even $3 even a year ago.)
Petrol went up by 20 per cent, food by 7 per cent and electricity by 7.8 per cent as the consumer price index rose 5.3 per cent in the year to June 30, the biggest rise since 1990.
The figure includes last year’s rise in GST but, even without it, inflation would still have been 3.3 per cent, above the Reserve Bank’s 1 per cent to 3 per cent target.
Now economists believe there is a 70 per cent chance of a rise in mortgage rates before December to try to curb inflation.
So why would you increase interest rates, putting up the cost of the mortgage, in order to give people even less money to put petrol in the car to get to work and earn the money they need to pay for the mortgage?
Why would you give them less money to put food on the table?
Why would you give them less money to heat their homes?
Because news reports are also saying that money is not being spent in retail stores. In fact an article in the Dom Post this morning actually bemoans that even the Kirkaldie and Staines winter sale is a bit of a damp squib – as opposed to the usual “queuing round the block” grand event.
And of course all of this goes hand in hand with little or no pay rises for the majority of people.
I can only hope that someone at the Reserve Bank of NZ can tell the somewhat obvious difference between inflation caused by people racking up credit to buy stuff they don’t need, and inflation caused by the basics rocketing up in price. It seems a bit obvious to me, but then I am not an economist.
Avalon’s Guide On Facebook
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