Pathways for Māori in Digitech
What a privilege it was to be joined by Phil Kupenga, founder and director of Next Chapter Consulting NZ, Shanon O’Connor, director of Tōnui Collab, and Pera Barrett, founder and chair of Shoebox Christmas Trust, as they share their insights on pathways for Māori in the industry – ngā mihi nui ki a koutou!
As Pera was unable to join us on the day, he kindly created a video for us.
Watch the videos or read the notes below:
Pātai 1: Tell us who you are? Where you are from? How did you get into this industry? And a bit about the mahi that you do?
Shanon O’Connor: Tēnā tatou katoa he uri ahau no Ngāti Porou, me Ngāi Tahu. Kō Shanon O’ Connor tōku ingoa. I am currently the founder and director of Tōnui Collabs. We are stem education specialists, our kaupapa is about creating opportunities for tamariki and rangatahi in Te Tairawhiti to explore the diversity of STEM. Our point of difference is that we use pūrākau māori to shape the exploration of various technologies. So whether it’s game development via electronics, digital art, engineering, chemistry etc, we’re trying to excite our tamariki, advise and encourage them. By using our purakau as both a motivator and a grounding force for the exploration. Why do we do it? We want to encourage more rangatahi to pursue study and career pathways into various stem roles.
In addition to being a part of the Tōnui collabs team, I also sit on the boards for Edtech NZ and for Te Matarau a Māui, Māori Tech Association and there’s synergy between all those things because every tepu I go to, the discussions are supporting the exploration of: How are the decisions we make affecting our tamariki? How can we empower our tamariki? Are we making tipuna decisions? So – Are the decisions we make supporting our tamariki to grow, to lead, to thrive in tech and across the stem ecosphere.
“How are the decisions we are making affecting our tamariki? How can we empower our tamariki? Are we making tipuna decisions?”
Phil Kupenga: Kō Phil Kupenga ahau, kō Ngāti Porou, me Te Whānau-ā-Apanui ōku iwi. I currently live between both Wellington and Gisborne. Gisborne is my hometown. I work in Wellington as a business analyst consultant (BA), predominately in IT projects. I’ve been in IT for 14 years and I’ve contracted for most of those times. So I’ve got myself to a level where I’m a senior business analyst in the industry. The other side of me, I took an initiative back home called the Te Tai Rāwhiti talent incubator, an initiative to get more māori into tech. I partnered with Dev Academy, who does full stack web development and have basically been working with our community to get māori into software development roles,or employment but also trying to open up that world around information technology. I have a passion for it because I’m in it.
Pera Barrett: Tēnā koutou, he uri tēnei nō Ngāti Toa Rangatira, nō Te Ātiawa ki Whakarongotai, nō Ngāti Raukawa ki te Tonga. Kia ora e te whānau, I’m Pera Barrett and I am a programme manager at Te Wānanga o Raukawa, we are building pathways for Māori into tech from Ōtaki. I also look after a kaupapa called Shoebox Christmas, a rangatahi development learning programme. I’m also a digital equity leader at Te Whatu Ora. My first grown up job was at a contact center at a bank, I had a bunch of different roles, from the service desk, to leadership roles in the digital team. While I was doing that, to compensate for that working in this very capitalist, not te Ao Māori / value aligned space, I started and was refining this kaupapa called Shoebox Christmas. We work with whanau and tamariki in the community, we connect them with gifters to make sure that they have a choice Christmas. I started that kaupapa with Facebook Messenger and a spreadsheet, and we were doing that for about 80 tamariki. A few years into that journey I realised that I needed to express these values / my Māori identity more, and I couldn’t do more of that without leveraging the power of digital technologies. I’m not talking about anything fancy here, I’m talking about having a website, having a platform, understanding how we might make it easier for people to sign up to take part in the kaupapa and connect with these whanau online.
I was living with a software developer at the time, he was my flatmate, and so we spent time trying to figure out how we might do that. So just by having that connection, the luck of living with this person who understood this technology. We were able to take this kaupapa and go from 80 tamariki at a school, to supporting over 17,000 tamariki per year across Aotearoa. I was still working in the bank and this digital product role came up, and I read the role and realised this is what I had been doing for the last few years in my volunteer work. So I interviewed for that job, and got it, really from the strength that I had been doing the role for a few years without even knowing what it was, so I had been trying to express my values as a māori, trying to solve these challenges that I saw for our people using technology. By that point, the first challenge that hit me was that I didn’t know I could be māori in that industry, so I didn’t know I could turn up to work, and be Māori. I didn’t know I could challenge the way things were being designed, or question how this was going to work for us. How do we know it’s going to work for us? I had no understanding of that at all. At any one point in that role, there was usually maybe 1 or 2 other Māori in the technology team right across the bank that I was in, so that was my first real challenge. I think after that, the challenge became how do I do this work, without it being the office side of the desk, because that’s what it was, that’s what the organisation wanted. They wanted me to do this stuff that was for Māori, but most of the time it was additional to the BAU, and additional to the actual accountability of the role. I wasn’t motivated to do it because of the organisation, I was motivated because I felt the obligation from my tupuna, my whanaunga, my tamariki and their tamariki to make sure that I leave that pathway into tech easier or better for them.
“The first challenge that hit me was that I didn’t know I could be Māori in that industry”
“I wasn’t motivated to do it because of the organisation, I was motivated because I felt the obligation from my tupuna, my whanaunga, my tamariki and their tamariki to make sure that I leave that pathway into tech easier or better for them”
Pātai 2: Tell us how you got into this industry? What did your pathway look like? And were there any challenges?
Phil Kupenga: I’ve been reflecting a lot about this, I’ve been working with the community and students on how to get into tech and it’s a really hard pathway. If I’m brutally honest, the awareness of information technology, I didn’t really have. I went to university and no one really said anything. I knew computers were going to be part of the equation but there wasn’t really anyone saying for Māori to go into tech. Everyone says be a lawyer, be a doctor etc, but that awareness piece wasn’t really there. I was really lucky that my wife became an IT recruiter. It’s quite a known story. I was actually a New Zealand police officer prior to this and I took two years leave without pay. And she said, I think you should try this business analyst role. And I basically said to her, I don’t know anything about information technology. And she just really articulated the role enough for me to basically say, it’s an intermediary between the developers and the business, and I thought yeah, obviously I’ve got those skills because I translate laws to people from judges down to common New Zealand citizens. And so I thought, let’s give it a crack.
If I’m really really honest, they were desperate, and I got into a role. And the reason why I talk about this is because I worked my way up in that profession when I was permanent. I was actually part of the hiring panel. And so really, the level became, you had to have an IT degree and I didn’t come from that background. So I really feel for people when they’re trying to get into our industry, not many people are telling you about these different roles. And it’s not that easy. So hence, as a kaupapa I’ve been trying to make that awareness that there are roles there and open up our minds a bit. I would say do you know the actual roles within information technology? Do we actually know these different roles? Business analysts, Solution architect, UX designers, there’s a whole bunch around that’s not technical, like testers. I think that’s the korero, just trying to expand people’s horizons that there’s so many different roles that you can do with information technology, and they sit outside. But, my challenge is really around awareness and really having people that believed that I could do it has been probably one of the biggest challenges.
“Do we actually know these different roles? Business analysts, Solution architect, UX designers, there’s a whole bunch around that’s not technical, like testers”
Shanon O’Connor: I’ve always liked technology and I think I was eight years old when my dad brought home a PC and we’re probably the first people in the street to have one. I was standard four when our class was the first class to have one in our kura. But I didn’t know that you could necessarily pursue a career in it. I knew that I liked playing with them. And then what’s sad I think is 20 years on and the secondary school space is still the same thing. I didn’t have any formal education or exploration into technology, but I went on to do an undergrad in information systems at Victoria, and started to really think about how technologies could be used. As a young mum when I was at university, I didn’t take part in any of the graduate programs because I couldn’t see how I could commit myself. So I moved into web content and worked for Deloitte for a number of years before wanting to move back to Turanganui a kiwa, I worked in the web space here mostly in web content management.
There wasn’t a strong tech industry in Te Tairawhiti, but 20 years on what we know is that tech is infiltrating all industries. So while we talk about the tech industry, we can also be talking about how there’s tech infiltrating every industry supporting and powering up across a range of organisations. I moved out of the tech space and retrained as an educator, as I had more children, and thought that that would be a great opportunity to support my tamariki. I survived in the education system for just over two years. The classroom is hard work. But I also then got an amazing opportunity to join the mind lab. The mind lab seemed like this mashup between the skill sets that I had, it was an education space that was exposing tamariki to the diversity of STEM and I was getting to see firsthand the lack of STEM expression in schools, I thought that working for the mind lab would be an opportunity to feed in and change the education system.
A few years later, we founded Tōnui Collabs. Which took some of the lessons learned from the mind lab and then allowed us to fine tune our commitment to tamariki and rangatahi Māori. To take our educational pedagogy, the understanding of how to celebrate our identity as Maori, the inherent knowledge that we have, and the taonga and the gifts from our tipuna and how we use this and celebrate it in the tech space. So instead of coming at this deficit thinking we’re able to recognize that in the walls of our marae, we can see the same cornerstones of computational thinking and yet we’re not telling our tamariki that it is something that they can adapt and fine tune and bring into the tech space. The ability to go wide, to zoom into this passion, to really open doorways, and create space to walk the path, so that our tamariki already have the confidence, the strength and the ability to do that. We should be so privileged as to have them walk into our workspaces and contribute to our problem solving.
So I think the challenges I faced were at university, in my undergrad program, I was a teen mom. And so the commitment at that time to move into a tech space required a really strong time commitment as an undergrad or as an intern. And as a parent, I couldn’t balance those things. And so I had to work out how to pursue a career in tech through an administration-like approach because that was the only way that I could be the mama I wanted to be in the tech space as well. That’s also what drives me to want to encourage employers to be part of addressing the problem with the lack of diversity of Māori and Tech because it’s also about changing our organisations.
“The ability to go wide, to zoom into this passion, to really open doorways, and create space to walk the path, so that our tamariki already have the confidence, the strength and the ability to do that”
Pera Barrett: It’s important to build pathways for Māori into digital and tech for a couple of reasons, the word pathways is important, pathways are long lasting. Pathways are things that others can follow, if you just hire more Māori into your organisation, that doesn’t serve anybody when you’re gone, except for the people you’ve brought on board. Pathway can also mean beliefs and values and understanding, so if you bring those Māori into your organisation and you help them to understand that there is a huge impact they can make by being māori in that role, by telling the story of what they’re doing, by sharing they’re pathways and successes, then they can start to have impact out further. And its important for them to be māori in that role, because we know that just the high paying nature of the industry helps whanau, so a whanau going from below median income to a tech industry median income, improves the life of that whanau, but also that māori being in that role also influences the way things are being made, increases the likelihood of these things being made for māori. Imagine if we had 15% of the tech workforce being māori, and if that is true for health, what difference would that make for the way services are being designed. So we know that Māori die 7 years earlier on average, than non māori. If we had māori designing those health services in the way that they are meant for us, we might save 7 years of early death from our people. So that’s the importance of it, it’s not just a whanau and pay thing. It’s a tamariki / mokopuna / how things are built thing, and that effects intergenerational
“ Pathways are long lasting”
“Imagine if we had 15% of the tech workforce being Māori, and if that was true for health, what difference would that make for the way services are being designed”
Pātai 3: Why is it important to create pathways and opportunities for Māori into digitech?
Shanon O’Connor: It’s multifaceted but I’ll go with its three fold. It’s creating more opportunities for Māori to thrive in tech, so the tech ecosystem or the tech industry is lucrative, it creates high earning roles, and so why should we not benefit from that? What a wonderful opportunity to address some of the socio economic challenges that face our people. And it also allows us to use our practices that we inherently have, our multigenerational thinking, our eco conscious practices so that we can create better solutions. I think it’s also about better products and services for everybody. So if you have a more inclusive workforce, if you have Māori contributing and leading throughout the whole design cycle, then you’re likely to have better products and services that meet our needs. If it’s not by us, is it truely for us?
The third is, the stats are out. They change, they say they’ve improved, the New Zealand tech report was released earlier this week, and it validates what we know to be true that the pipeline is broken, that the demand is high, and Aotearoa’s ability to address the demand is impossible, where we are importing over 50% of our talent. Importing should always be part of the solution, but that’s not sustainable. And so we’ve got a need to address, that we are designing a solution that invites more Māori to be part of the design process, to be part of their creation of tech solutions so that they are addressing the problems that are relevant to us as well.
“ it also allows us to use our practices that we inherently have, our multigenerational thinking, our eco conscious practices so that we can create better solutions”
“If you have Māori contributing and leading throughout the whole design cycle, then you’re likely to have better products and services that meet our needs”
“If it’s not by us, is it truely for us?”
Phil Kupenga: I actually really struggled at school, I never really talked about this, but I was homeschooled in Gisborne from form 1 to form 6, and then I went back for my last year. Extremely shy, I hated school all the way through. I was the king bunker, truancy they call it. But the reason why I bring that up, Is because I was like a duck to water in this [tech] space. My brain is logical, I used to play a lot of chess with my dad. He used to do the Rubik’s cubes, and crosswords, all that type of stuff. And so I was adaptable, and I’ve always been like that. I understand how systems work. That was always my belief that a lot of our communities and Māori will really thrive in this industry, it was really around that kaupapa that I know that the education system hasn’t worked for many of us, but you will kill it in this industry and once you get in, you realise that you’ve got that ability. And that’s just really rifting off what Shannon was saying that she had an interest in tech, I had an interest in tech too. I think I was doing coding but I never really talked about it because I was homeschooled and my mom wanted me to expand my brain but I think coming back to the kaupapa around pathways. When you’re driving this kind of kaupapa and telling Māori to come into tech, there’s really low representation. It’s only really around 4%, this is the topic that keeps going around year after year, around the lack of representation.
I think the digital report basically says it’s still 4%, It’s still low. I’ve told everyone it’s lucrative, that’s usually the way I get the young guys if they want to make the money. And that is the absolute truth. At the end of the day if you want to come into a future ready industry that’s basically still gonna have jobs, then this is the industry. We can talk about the money, the money is kind of important. But, what’s the rationale for people that come in? I think about my son a lot of these times when I’m thinking about these issues, would I teach my son digital literacy, hell yeah. This is the environment you’re coming into, the rationale for me setting up was, the future of work. They said AI, robotics come together. A lot of the manual work will be taken over because of this technology. Well, who do you think sits at the laboring force? Māori! We’re seeing a real push in that space. So for example, COVID has accelerated remote working. Unless you’re on the technology base, who’s going to remote work around here. Most of our whanau are in central working, so they’ve got to be out there.
When COVID was happening. I sat at my desk, working remotely making a lot of money and my whole community was pretty much essential workers when COVID hit, and we didn’t even know if that virus was going to kill anyone. I thought man, that can’t be right. That is not the way our people should be in this position. But that’s the reality of it. The technology is moving that quick. The second reason why you want pathways for our communities is because tech is everywhere, and really the tech industry needs us. And that’s the position that I stay here is that they actually need us and they need to have tikanga to be fair. There are so many big issues that are happening in regards to technology and we’re just talking about a really superficial level, about money and that people should be joining. Technology is revolving our world, AI – who knew anything about that, now we’re talking about chat GBT, jobs getting taken, creative stuff getting taken. We need to be on that whole thing, parents out there, you need to be encouraging your kids to get into tech. I’ll tell you now, my boy will learn coding. I already know that you need to be getting that digital literacy. And you need to be pushing our community to basically look at that because if we don’t, then we are going to get left behind.
The other thing about it is why I say they need us because they need our value system. There’s some major issues when we talk about technology, and this is the view that we need to take – misinformation. One of the biggest crippling things that we’ve seen around us was our values in light of these systems. Half our kids are on social media, the narrative and the voice that they’re hearing, does anyone know that that’s addictive? No, we don’t. So there’s a little bit of the entry point that we need to get our community in, but what I want to be thinking is we need to be thought leaders in the space, not actually just participants. When we talk about money, money will get us to the door, but kaupapa is the key to keep Māori there. And I think that’s the key piece I want to talk about when we talk about why Māori should be going pathways into tech.
“At the end of the day if you want to come into a future ready industry that’s basically still gonna have jobs, then this is the industry”
“We need to be thought leaders in the space, not actually just participants”
Pera Barrett: Technology is just technology. We’ve been using new versions of technology for 1000s of years, from hawaiki-nui to here. Think about it as a way to better solve the challenges that you care about. It’s not just about learning a new skill, although that’s awesome. It’s about being able to use that skill, to do the things that are important for you, for your whanau, for your people. And that’s what digitech and technology enables. Since I started the kaupapa of Shoebox Christmas we have been able to help over 74,000 whanau, and we wouldn’t have been able to do that without digital technology, it’s just a leverage to improve the ability to deliver the things that are important to us. The other bit of advice is to look for those neighbours, those flatmates, that is the single thing that allowed me to think about turning Shoebox Christmas into a kaupapa that goes across the motu. So remember the importance of bringing your peers along with you. If you get into a role of digitech, you can be that flatmate, you can be the one that says, hey let’s have a talk about the mahi that you are doing that’s really good for our people, I might be able to help you scale that and do it more, so remember that you can be the luck that someone else runs into as well by sharing your story and reaching out.
“It’s about being able to use that skill, to do the things that are important for you, for your whanau, for your people. And that’s what digitech and technology enables”
Pātai 4: What’s one piece of advice you can give to Māori to help them navigate their way into digitech?
Phil Kupenga: I feel like our communities need to be more proactive, and it starts with our parents and also the community. In my journey to try to get more Māori into tech, we are seeing that the system doesn’t help us. The education system doesn’t teach this stuff, it’s in bits and pieces. My thing is about being proactive, I’m not leaving it up to schools to educate my son, I think we need to be brutally honest about that, it’s a mixed bag for everybody out there. The thing about technology and the internet is that it closed the gap for everything, it closed the gap for business, before the internet came you would have to go to saatchi and saatchi to advertise, now we can just go to instagram. I believe it closed down the education barrier too with YouTube. If you tell me you can’t code, I can tell you, you could do a formalised course, or you can find some stuff out there that you can actually do via YouTube and AI. We’ve got an over saturation of information. So the first point is, be proactive, don’t be reactive. The second part of that korero is, we need to broaden our korero. Yes it is about our young people, but the most inspirational people are the adults too. We have a lot of underemployed (low waged earners), who don’t believe that they can get into this role. I can be proven that I got into this role as an adult. I have had to do my higher learning, but I have been, and I have been a role model for my whanau, nothing builds awareness like when your whanau are doing this job. We have Māori networks that are here and can be supportive. We need to take control of this and not be bound that the system will repair it because it wont.
“The thing about technology and the internet is that it closed the gap for everything”
“Be proactive, don’t be reactive”
Shanon O’Connor: Similar to Phil, my piece of advice to Māori to navigate into the digitech space is to find a community, and seek mentorship, to spend time with māori who are thriving in a tech space, to attend webinars like this and go to gatherings, to be supported and be a contributing member of the ecosystem. And to Māori that are in the tech space, help a sister out, go and offer your time, spend time with rangatahi, share with them your experiences and be part of that sustainable visibility of Māori thriving in tech. We partner with marae across Te Tairāwhiti, creating virtual reality wananga, our kaupapa has always been tamariki and rangatahi driven, but what we have been reminded of, is the importance of whanau in this whole experience. When we have the wananga we are creating space for our tamariki to learn about VR and how to use it, to share pūrākau, or their marae, we invite whanau to come and learn alongside their tamariki, to celebrate what they are creating, have a kapu ti, and talk about the career opportunities that might be available to them. We invite Māori who are thriving in this tech space who have time, to come and hang out with us at the marae, building, experimenting and having chats with whanau about the ways that our tamariki can pathway into tech but also addressing some of those fundamental digital equity issues, because when we have a clearer understanding about digital inequity, even from a foundation perspective of inadequate devices in the home, inability for whanau to access social services online, because some of these agencies have moved to online only and our whanau don’t have connectivity or access to devices. It starts there and then we step up into the space of thriving, rather than just getting by.
“Find a community, and seek mentorship, to spend time with Māori who are thriving in a tech space, to attend webinars like this and go to gatherings, to be supported and be a contributing member of the ecosystem”
Pera Barrett: It’s simple, it has to start here, it’s the need to question and interrogate yourself honestly. So do you know and understand why it is that you want to bring more Māori on board? Do you understand the actual benefits to your organisation? Or is it just a number that someone has come up with? Do you understand the benefit of having those different world views, those different lenses, those different values that we bring to a design practice or a development practice, and also is it a reciprocal outcome that you are aiming for? Another really confronting question is – Is there a benefit to Māori in being in your organisation? Have you created a workplace that is safe for them? Do you know what that means? Do you know what cultural safety for māori looks like in your organisation? And if you don’t know, then how will you find out? Because if you don’t know, how are you going to know that you are succeeding in bringing more Māori into your workplace safely and in a way that they want to stay there and be Māori. There’s no point bringing māori into your workplace, that when they get there, they can’t be themselves. If when they get there they don’t even know that they can be themselves. So you have to be open to confronting yourself, and having challenging questions asked of yourself about how and why you want to onboard more māori into your organisation. Kia ora.
“There’s no point bringing Māori into your workplace, that when they get there, they can’t be themselves”
Pātai 5: What’s one piece of advice that you could give to pakihi, to help them onboard more Māori?
Phil Kupenga: I can give a practical equation about this. I’ve got 7 people employed in different organisations, 2 had to come to Wellington, so my whole kaupapa is to actually employ people back home. We have a budding tech industry, for example one person at hauora that has taken an IT helpdesk role. Total technologies is a local start up, they have taken one of our guys as a developer. But not many employers have been forthcoming. So there’s a bit of a gap that we really need to close up. I was lucky, I have got this billion dollar company who has taken 2 of my guys remotely and they will probably be a pipeline for other people that are going to work. Some of those bigger companies have taken Māori on board, but locally I have struggled to get local people in there. One of the things you’ve got to remember when taking Māori aboard is you gotta remember that they are junior people and so you need to support them. There needs to be a high mentorship, and there kinda needs to be some funding to support them in that goal. The issue that we’ve really had around the tech industry is everyone wants to hit the ground running, it’s easier to physically get people from out of our country and bring them here because they can hit the ground running, they are intermediates, but that is a poor equation. If you really want to build our talent, we need to actually start and we need to know there’s gonna be pains building that talent. I’m being realistic to the employers out there, that you’re gonna have to spend some time and there’s gotta be some real appreciation that you’ve gotta work with our people to get them up to speed. The talent is actually really short worldwide, with people who can hit the ground running, so they have to pay an astronomical price for talent, so they’re looking for initiatives to see how they can start a pipeline of building people and talent. It’s outside the traditional realms, not just looking at universities in the top 2%, it’s actually looking at people that they can work within communities.
The second thing is my perspective, my opinion, I think it’s Māori tech companies that will take our talent, I think our talent is more for them. The way I’ve always perceived it, when I’m talking about my guys, I want them to be the best. The Māori practitioners I know of, they are at the top of their game. I don’t see our people just coming into make the numbers, I actually see us dominating, and we need entrepreneurs to work with our talent. That was always my vision, to build our own talent, build our own businesses, whack them together. We do need help at this stage for the big companies, but in reality, if they don’t help us, then to be honest, we just move on. So if anyone is thinking about these models, they’ve gotta think a bit more holistic. We actually have to build the muscle of tech entrepreneurship along with tech talent. It doesn’t operate the other way around, and so there is a korero, we’ve got to get them into employers, like the government, like amazon etc. I think there’s a transition point, but we should be thinking Māori companies, Māori tech talent, and the rationale I put with that is if we really want tino rangatiratanga, companies are where we need to put our effort into. That is the ecosystem that we need to put our people into, and people will go ‘’you can’t!?’’Amazon makes more than our country, so even in a mediocre tech company, you will be alright.
“If you really want to build our talent, we need to actually start”
Shanon O’Connor: I think it’s about long term investment, it’s about investing in training, recruitment and retention. So that can talk to how we train, how we are supporting secondary schools, and their inability to teach across some of these areas. How are we exploring options other than universities, such as internships, apprenticeships, paid opportunities so that you can earn while you learn. It’s also about the recruitment, part of the recruitment is ‘Are you making visible that you have Māori in leadership? because if you don’t then how is that enticing us to come into your organisations. There are too many horror stories, we need to change it, we want to see more Māori in tech, but not at the expense of everything, not at the expense of checking our tikanga, our identity at the door, and so organisations need to do better, and that in turn will mean that you will retain a better workforce. Because again if you look at that report that’s come out this week what you see is that there are students who are studying digital technologies at secondary school, but they’re not continuing it to university. You are seeing students study at university and graduating and then they are not making it into the workforce, or they’re starting in the workforce and in 1-3 years they’re out and they’re not shifting to other jobs, they’re leaving the industry because it’s not a safe space to be. So I think if we were to be giving advice to organisations on how they could do better? Is do better, be better!
“ Part of the recruitment is ‘Are you making visible that you have Māori in leadership? because if you don’t then how is that enticing us to come into your organisations”
“So I think if we were to be giving advice to organisations on how they could do better? Is do better, be better!“
Audience Pātai 6: How will changes in Tech effect the pathways in training and development for rangatahi, as we seemingly approach AI?
Phil Kupenga: I’m always interested in this, because everyone talks about how coding will be gone tomorrow etc. I’m always trying to figure out, if these people are on IT projects, if they actually sit on them? or are they talking because they read an article? I think AI is definitely going to change things. But I always believe if you are in the industry, you can pivot to whatever needs to be happening. That is the thing about this industry, you are continuously learning, because 14 years ago, there’s a lot of positions I’d never heard of that are in Information Technology. So my view is I’ll be watching carefully and when it pivots, I’m moving there, and that’s always my thing is that you continuously have to learn, you continuously have to adapt. Bigger picture when we’re talking about tech talent, cloud computing is huge, cloud solutions have AI components, that basically talk about machine learning, these are the things that I am dealing with on a daily basis, now that I am back on my tools. I’m talking about Māori data sovereignty, I’m talking about how AI can do facial recognition in our communities. There’s a whole bunch of things that I’m working on in that space , and I’m learning about the technology. I never think machines will take over humans, it can replicate a lot of things, but it can’t replicate our human emotions, so for example, you could say a speech and replicate a great speech, but I’m the one that’s gonna sell it. I need to be the one that’s gonna change the hearts and the minds of people. So tech people, we need to adapt to. We need to be a lot more people oriented. I think that’s the key. I think businesses need to be able to communicate what technology is doing and how we weave through that. But I don’t look at AI as if I’m gonna lose my job. I look at it like what’s the opportunity?
“You continuously have to learn, you continuously have to adapt”
“I don’t look at AI as if I’m gonna lose my job. I look at it like “what’s the opportunity?“
Shanon O’Connor: To build on what Phil’s saying, but also to pivot a little bit, to talk about, I think there’s an exciting space especially in education, we recognise that there’s a shortage of educators with the skill sets to be able to encourage, inspire and teach our young people and the strength of AGI is that, people need people, and sometimes we just need a hype boy beside us to encourage us but we don’t necessarily have the knowledge. The power of technology and AGI is that we can be learning, and technology can be customising our study pathways, but we still actually want to be learning with people, and it’s really powerful because then we can do collaborative problem solving, but AGI will be able to change our accessibility to education. We can use AGI to do the skill teaching and we can use our people to encourage us, mentor us and support us.
