Training Opportunities: Exploring what happens two months later

Conclusion

Training Opportunities outcomes are strongly influenced by a range of internal and external factors. Using the administrative dataset to examine the key influencers of two month labour market outcomes shows that, of all the administrative variables, the rate at which learners attain credits is the most powerful predictor of two month outcomes.

There are also large differences between different regions, perhaps reflecting the differing regional labour markets in New Zealand. The employment history of the learner is one of the more important influencers, with learners with no or little prior labour market experience less likely to gain employment than others.

Other strong influencers are the education history of the learner, the strength of the national labour market, training provider type (a proxy for ‘need’), placement order and gender.

This shows that the strength of Training Opportunities two month outcomes, as for Youth Training⁷, depend quite heavily on factors external to the programme, such as the strength of the labour market and employers’ willingness to employ persons with little or no prior labour market experience, as well as what occurs on training programmes. In times of economic downturn, when jobs are necessarily scarce, it is likely pressure for participation in Training Opportunities will increase, but also that two month employment labour market outcomes will decline. Further training outcomes may increase at such times, as well as the proportion of learners who return to Training Opportunities.

The mix of unit standards between various fields of study seems to have some influence, with learners in vocationally placed courses more likely to gain employment than those who take predominantly generic or humanities fields courses.

There are clear differences between ethnic groups, and these may be due to a multiplicity of factors, including the concentration of Māori and Pasifika in certain industries, and the decline of these industries (for example manufacturing and forestry).⁸ Females are less likely to gain employment than further training, and the opposite is true for males.

There may also be a marking effect with persons placed multiple times in Training Opportunities: employers may be less willing to offer employment to people who they perceive to be ‘high needs’, and multiple placements (four or more) may label them as such. Alternatively, the decline in likelihood of employment outcomes for learners placed four or more times may be because only people with the highest need have this many placements (and this need is somehow not captured by the other variables in the model). On balance the prior explanation (the training effect) seems more likely.

It should be noted that the outcomes collected for Training Opportunities are short term and  little information on the longer term effects of participation in the programme is currently available. 

Footnotes

7. See Mahoney, P 2009 (2).  
8. Department of Labour, 2009. pg. 18.