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Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure Rebuild Team

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Hawkins Group

Hawkins Group

Training and development hard-baked into SCIRT’s alliance agreement

The Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure Rebuild Team (SCIRT) is well known for its first class post-quake infrastructure work. Less well known is that training and development is a lynchpin of its alliance agreement with funding partners CERA, Christchurch City Council and the New Zealand Transport Agency.

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Over five years the SCIRT programme will complete hundreds of rebuild projects in conjunction with its external delivery teams – City Care, Downer, Fletchers, Fulton Hogan and McConnell Dowell.

SCIRT engages approximately 1400 people from a variety of organisations including over 80 civil contractor firms that work closely with these delivery teams. That’s a lot of people, and it’s fair to say that training is the glue that binds everyone together.

Importantly one of SCIRT’s alliance objectives is to “lift the capability of the sector wide workforce” and leave a legacy to industry.

First and foremost, SCIRT encourages team members to work towards qualifications across the NZQA infrastructure spectrum. Examples include Infrastructure Works Level 2 through to the esteemed CPENG professional engineer.

SCIRT’s operational workforce is enthusiastic about embracing external training opportunities. The proof is certainly in the numbers, with over 20 percent working towards an NZQA qualification. Now that’s a feather in the cap, especially given the industry standard is five percent.

For SCIRT’s performing partner teams, the more they encourage and engage their workforces into NZQA qualifications the more work they get. How’s that for an incentive?

Secondly, SCIRT operates a dedicated training centre. Led by five highly experienced civil trainers, the centre has seen over 65 team members complete National Certificates and more than 1010 Unit Standards assessed. The trainers also deliver short courses, which have so far attracted a whopping 6000 attendees.

Between them, SCIRT trainers have 200 years of civil construction experience, meaning those being trained are in incredibly good hands.

Among other courses, the training team runs a SCIRTspecific Site Safe course. And, in a nod to SCIRT’s exemplary corporate citizenship, new industry entrants are supported through an innovative ‘ready for work’ course called FORREAL!

FORREAL! has proven to be a highly popular way to prepare incoming industry talent. It works under the umbrella of NZQA Infrastructure Works Level 2, and sees trainees complete a six to eight week pre-employment programme. They then move into employment and complete training under the wing of a SCIRT trainer.

SCIRT enjoys a close relationship with industry training organisation Connexis. So much so that a memorandum of understanding was signed in 2012 to leverage the unique opportunity the SCIRT alliance provides for industry to speak with one voice and engage in qualification development.

To top it all off, SCIRT is wholly committed to making sure staff are given the opportunity to build careers. This includes offering, in collaboration with Connexis, a first line management and crew leaders programme. These are subsidised for subcontractors and emphasised in partner KPIs.

Four years on, the task of rebuilding Christchurch’s earthquake damaged infrastructure remains vast. However, with organisations like SCIRT taking a leading role we can be confident that major rebuild projects are benefiting from skilled people and are going ahead as smoothly as possible. l

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