Skilled Wine Workforce Report

NZW, Wine Marlborough and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment's Sector Workforce Engagement Team are pleased to release A Skills-based Wine Workforce - a report and accompanying dashboard which provide workforce insights to inform business, industry, and government activity to deliver a sustainable wine industry workforce.

A skills-based wine workforce 

The Report was commissioned from BERL to deliver insights into current and future workforce skills requirements. A national survey for the wine industry was conducted to gather data to define the current and future roles and skills. BERL also analysed wine and viticulture job advertisements in New Zealand and Australia over the past 10 years. 

Together the survey and the job analysis deliver a national ‘snapshot’ of job clusters and job families, outlines demand for specific skills across the clusters and families and identifies potential future opportunities and risks facing the industry. 

(This Report is a national snapshot but does not represent the national industry, due to data limitations.)

Findings

The Report highlighted that wine industry roles have skills that are complementary and would support development in multiple career pathways, providing opportunities for people to remain in the wine industry.

Survey responses highlighted areas for development including:

• Clarifying job descriptions, such as through using common language to describe skills
• Using skills to help businesses to understand how individuals could develop and move between roles, enabling businesses to better utilise their workforce
• Linking technical skills to a specific job family, to assist with group training and recruitment.

Using the Report

The Report is being made publicly available for use by industry and key stakeholders in future decision making, including:

• By NZW – refresh of the national Sustainable Workforce Action Plan
• By regional wine associations – prioritise activity that identifies and meets regional needs
• By businesses – inform recruitment and training approaches, such as the review of job descriptions to match skills to role requirements, and to map employee career plans against business skill requirements
• By training providers – develop and review training qualifications to meet industry’s future needs
• By local government – identify job clusters to match to regional attraction strategies and infrastructure planning
• By central government - inform and support future decisions related to workforce planning in the wine industry.

Updating NZW’s Sustainable Workforce Action Plan

The current Sustainable Workforce Action Plan captures NZW’s workforce activities for 2022-2024. The plan will now be updated for 2024-2026 and will include consideration of activities to support a skilled workforce, including:

• Sharing the Report with key stakeholders, including regional wine associations and government agencies
• Agreeing with Muka Tangata how they can utilise the Report in the current review of entry level food and fibre qualifications
• Discuss with the Food and Fibre CoVE opportunities to collaborate with its skills framework project
• Updating the career pathways resources.

Dashboard

The dashboard is an interactive tool to demonstrate the expected growth in skills and roles to 2030, based on analysis of wine and viticulture job advertisements in New Zealand and Australia over the past 10 years: 

For questions on the Report please contact advocacy@nzwine.com.