8 minute read
Future-proofing your workforce
Kathy Young, editor of Human Resources magazine, spotlights two organisations taking bold steps to secure the future of their workforces.
Fonterra Co-operative Group and Skills Group were finalists in the recent NZ HR Awards 2025, alongside NZ Post and One NZ. All four organisations have implemented pioneering initiatives demonstrating how strategic workforce planning and technological adoption can position organisations for long-term success. Their approaches offer valuable insights for HR professionals navigating similar challenges in their own organisations.
Fonterra Co-operative Group
As New Zealand’s seventh largest employer of engineers, Fonterra Co-operative Group faced a critical challenge: despite employing around 300 professional engineers, the company wasn’t ranked among the top five employers of choice for engineering graduates. With ambitious sustainability goals for the business, including decarbonisation requirements and complex wastewater management challenges, Fonterra recognised engineering talent as a scarce and critical resource that demanded strategic intervention.
STRATEGIC WORKFORCE PLANNING WITH PURPOSE
Fonterra’s journey began with a strategic workforce planning session that identified engineering as a scarce and critical capability gap in a highly competitive labour market.
“When we looked at our long-term aspirations and our strategic goals, it was very obvious that with our sustainability journey, including our decarbonisation and wastewater ambitions, engineering was going to be critical for these to be delivered on time,” explains Kate Shirley, Fonterra Head of People and Culture for Global Engineering and Technical, who partners with the engineering teams.
The stakes were high. Legal obligations require Fonterra to eliminate coal usage by 2037, this is part of a broader effort to reduce emissions and achieve sustainability targets, while customer sustainability demands, iwi relationships and resource consenting agreements create additional complexities. These factors converged to make engineering talent not just desirable but essential to maintaining the company’s ‘licence to operate’ as well as achieving its strategic ambitions.
BEYOND GENERIC SOLUTIONS
Instead of immediately implementing broad initiatives, Fonterra’s People and Culture team partnered directly with engineers to identify specific pain points. “We did some empathy interviews using design thinking methodology across our internal workforce,” says Kate. “The biggest piece that came out to us was that engineers were telling us, ‘I don’t know where to go next at Fonterra. I don’t know what my engineering career pathway looks like’.”
This testing phase proved crucial. From there, Fonterra introduced several initiatives to address the attraction and retention of engineers through various targeted approaches.
Specialised engineering careers website: Unlike their general careers page, this dedicated portal showcases diverse engineering opportunities across water, energy and infrastructure disciplines. The result? “We’ve seen higher engagement through the engineering careers page,” reports Kate. The engagement rate is 87 per cent, surpassing the general Fonterra Careers website by 15 per cent.
Career pathways mapping: Responding directly to retention concerns, Fonterra created clear engineering career pathways showing progression options for both technical specialists and those aspiring to leadership. These pathways outline the experiences and skills needed at each stage, making career development more transparent and achievable.
Organisational restructuring: Initially working with a decentralised model of engineering teams spread across four business units, Fonterra used targeted talent conversations to inform a major realignment. “Because we’d had those talent conversations, we were able to be far more deliberate about who went where”, says Kate. The reorganisation achieved an impressive 60 per cent internal placement rate.
Creating middle-tier roles: The team identified a critical gap in their engineering career ladder. “We had these entrylevel roles and middle roles, and then we had really senior roles, and we didn’t have many roles in between,” notes Kate. New intermediate positions now make career progression more visible and attainable.
One year into implementation, Fonterra’s Engineering++ SWAT team has demonstrated how targeted HR interventions can directly support strategic business objectives while addressing genuine employee needs. By consistently focusing on both attraction and retention, Fonterra has created an engineering value proposition that supports both immediate operational needs and longterm sustainability goals.
Fonterra Co-operative Group won the 2025 NZ HR Future of Work Award, in association with Tomorrow’s People.
MAIN LEARNINGS FOR HR PROFESSIONALS
Several transferable lessons emerge from Fonterra’s experience.
Link strategy to pragmatic actions: “Saying we’ve got a scarce and critical skill set of engineering in a strategic workforce plan is actually very broad, and not really helpful in terms of saying what do we want to do,” cautions Kate. The task is translating broad strategic goals into specific, actionable initiatives.
Simplify and prioritise: “We weren’t afraid to say, ‘That’s too complicated, we can’t deliver that in six months’,” explains Kate. Using tools like Miro boards to park ideas for future phases helped maintain focus without losing valuable insights.
Enable flexible collaboration: By using accessible project tools rather than hidden documents, Fonterra enabled asynchronous participation. “Find the tools that help people, and help people to help you,” advises Kate.
Learn across organisations: Cross-pollination of ideas proved valuable, with Fonterra exchanging insights with other organisations like ACC. The approach proved so successful that they are now initiating another round of ideation, which could include plans to facilitate secondments between Fonterra and significant engineering partners recognising that “we can’t give engineers every engineering experience they ever want”.
Skills Group
When Skills Group identified that AI would fundamentally disrupt the education and workforce development sector within three to five years, they faced a critical challenge. With over 60 per cent of their 449 employees in vocational teaching roles not traditionally engaged with digital tools, the risk of being left behind was substantial. Rather than viewing this as merely a learning opportunity, Skills Group recognised it as “a capability risk” that demanded immediate action.
THE AI SKILLS GAP HEAD-ON
“This wasn’t just a learning challenge; it was a capability risk,” explains Clare Le Grice, Head of Capability at Skills Group. “We knew that if we didn’t move fast to build understanding, our people would be left behind by the very systems they rely on every day.”
Their response was strategic and comprehensive. The organisation built a crossfunctional AI Acceleration Team, developed clear governance policies and created practical tools – including custom GPTs – designed to meet employees where they were at in their AI journey.
This approach addressed a fundamental reality that many organisations miss: “The real risk isn’t that people aren’t using AI because they are, but that they don’t fully understand how it works, what the risks are or how to use it responsibly.”
BUILDING A CULTURE OF EXPERIMENTATION
Skills Group anchored their initiative in their organisational values – grow, bold, joy and manaakitanga –to shape what they describe as “a movement grounded in trust, not fear”. This cultural foundation proved crucial in overcoming the anxiety many employees feel about AI.
The results speak volumes. Within just one year, 86 per cent of staff engaged in AI upskilling, including nearly half from traditionally non-digital roles. The organisation ran six live workshops attended by 386 employees, implemented 31 AI use cases, created 8 in-house GPTs, and explored 18 different AI tools.
The real risk isn’t that people aren’t using AI because they are, but that they don’t fully understand how it works, what the risks are or how to use it responsibly.
By creating psychological safety around technology experimentation, Skills Group transformed potential resistance into enthusiasm. AI became the top skill in their LinkedIn Learning collections, with 88 unique learners voluntarily seeking additional AI knowledge.
MEASURABLE PRODUCTIVITY GAINS
The business impact of Skills Group’s approach has been substantial and quantifiable:
content development accelerated by up to 65 per cent
policy design processes became 80 per cent faster, reducing a three to four-month process to two to three weeks
data analysis improved by 30 per cent to 70 per cent
tenders and reports required 30 per cent to 40 per cent less reworking while achieving higher quality.
These efficiency gains demonstrate how effective AI upskilling translates directly to organisational performance. However, Skills Group emphasises that “more than metrics, we’ve seen a shift in mindset. People feel more curious, and more capable about AI. It has become part of how we think, not just what we use.”
HR IMPERATIVE
With a goal of achieving 100 per cent AI capability across their workforce by the end of 2025, Skills Group reminds us that the future of work is rapidly approaching:
Making AI a part of the workplace is not just about technology – it’s about capability, confidence, and context, and understanding that the future isn’t waiting – it’s already here.
MAIN LEARNINGS FOR HR PROFESSIONALS
Skills Group’s experience offers valuable insights for HR leaders looking to build AI capability.
Contextualise, don’t just train: “Show how AI is already embedded in everyday tools people use, like Microsoft 365, learning management systems, recruitment platforms, etc.” This approach helps employees see AI as an extension of familiar tools rather than something entirely new and threatening.
Digital fluency ≠ AI fluency: A critical insight from Skills Group is that “even digital native employees need help understanding what responsible AI use looks like”. Technical comfort with digital tools doesn’t automatically translate to understanding AI’s unique capabilities, limitations and ethical considerations.
Dedicate time for learning: Skills Group built “AI learning into our existing culture of development with two paid learning hours per week”. This formal allocation of time signals the organisation’s commitment and recognises that meaningful skill development requires protected time.
Focus on early wins: “Build the case for value early,” Claire recommends. “Look for small wins and real examples that help drive belief and acceptance of AI.” These concrete examples help overcome scepticism and build momentum.
Frame AI as an enabler, not a replacement: By helping “people see AI as a partner – something that enables, not replaces,” Skills Group shifted the narrative from job threat to job enhancement.
