offshore kiwis

Borders May Close – Minds Need Not

As a Kiwi who lived offshore for almost eight years, I relished the opportunity to build on my New Zealand based skills and perspectives. 
Operating a digital business in a highly competitive market sharpened my ability to understand audience behaviour. It taught me how to use data to drive strategy, ways to develop alternate revenue streams and importantly, how to lead teams through change.
I was beyond excited at the prospect of bringing these, often hard-learned skills home to Aotearoa to see how I might be able to help grow a company on the soil where I grew up.  

Rude awakening

Arriving home four years ago, however, proved to be a rude awakening.
I was told by more than one recruiter that my skills were irrelevant in NZ, that I should be ready to halve my salary and hope to work my way back into a leadership position over the coming years. 

This is my story, but it is also the story of so many Kiwi returning home.  
We are a passionate nation, proud of what we achieve collectively. 
We love to see companies like Xero and RocketLab on the world stage. 
Yet we are also more than a little unwelcoming of tall poppies, particularly if they come in the form of Kiwi returning home. 
For some reason we feel a sense of abandonment that they left us, and more than a dash of incredulity that in a reality-shifting moment like a global pandemic, they would want to be home amongst family, familiar faces and places. 
As a small island nation on the edge of the globe we have learnt to be self-reliant and to build things our way.
Our response to the covid-19 pandemic was also purpose-built to make the most of our natural maritime border.  

Risk of closed minds

But I sense that in the current moment we are at risk of closing our minds, as well as our borders. 
As a country we need more high value innovative companies like Soul Machines and Seequent, we need to increase our frontier firms and our productivity. 
Part of this could be achieved through driving diversity of thought and including not only cultural differences from amongst our resident population, but also the different perspectives gleaned from our whānau offshore and recently returned.
In my work with Kea, I have seen the breadth and depth of passionate thought leadership and experience within our offshore network. 
These unique global Kiwi deliver innovation in a wide range of industries, for other nations. What might it take for NZ to open our mind to what they have to offer us?  
With the country riding high in global brand perception, we have more global Kiwi than ever wanting to support the country they are so proud of – through the talent or investment of those who choose to return, or the ideas and perspectives of those who remain offshore.

Carpe Kiwi

It is up to us as a community to navigate the solution, grabbing on to the amazing opportunity that exists.
On my return to Aotearoa, I had some soul searching to do. 
I needed to rethink my skill set and find the right terms of reference to appeal to a New Zealand-based company. 
Importantly, I had to find the right way to integrate myself into its team and culture. 
Returning Kiwi would do well to do the same.
But an enormous opportunity also exists for NZ to be open to new ideas and to find ways to amplify returning Kiwi skills that might not sit in a job description. 
We need to lose the fear of being told there’s another way of doing things and be ready to embrace healthy challenges to the status quo – the impact could be far-reaching.

Open minds

While it may take a few years to improve cost of living, housing and traffic issues, the one thing every one of us can do right now, is to open our minds.
We are the employers, the policy makers, the community and the whānau who can welcome these valuable Kiwi back home.
 And for a group who largely made the call to give up their lives to return to the familiar, this emotional support could go an awfully long way to securing their ongoing loyalty and value.

When Robert Muldoon famously quipped to a journalist that New Zealanders who migrated to Australia “raised the IQ of both countries”, his response diminished the value of those who left and reflected the indignation of those who remained.

As a nation we’ve always had a love/hate relationship with those who’ve departed (even as most of us have, at one time or another, departed). For almost 30 years there was a feeling that some of our best and brightest were abandoning us and heading to greener pastures. Those departures felt like insults directed at those who’d stayed. Whether through envy or tall poppy syndrome, we perceived that the departees earned more overseas, had greater career opportunities, travelled more, had more exposure to culture and more fun than those New Zealanders who remained.

But clearly, whatever Muldoon may have said or implied, the estimated one million New Zealanders we lost offshore were hard-working and smart. Among them were likely many of the best and most talented minds we’d ever bred, educated and trained here during our recent history.

When Kea was established in 2001, it was out of recognition that these expats, sitting just across the ocean, could provide essential human capital and the diversity of perspective New Zealand needed to build a great economy – innovative business people, tech entrepreneurs, exceptional creative talent… we just had to reach out and ask them to stay connected to NZ, to help. We did ask, and many answered.

Almost 20 years on, in the time of Covid, as many of these overseas New Zealanders now seek to return home and the country’s brain drain has reversed, they’re now finding a very mixed welcome.

That is a missed opportunity for New Zealand.

Not only are we failing to arrange a soft landing for these New Zealanders we have long lamented the loss of, they’re facing an unclear process and sometimes hostile rhetoric from the media and public – increasingly convincing them to stay away.

New Zealand has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reap the benefits of a multitude of candidates with offshore skills, experience and perspective in a world where borders remain closed to non-citizens.  With the second largest offshore population in the OECD, New Zealand has a competitive advantage in the skills race.

In managed isolation right now (or waiting for a flight) potentially is the kind of talent established New Zealand businesses are increasingly looking offshore to recruit. Essential skills holders such as nurses, vets and diesel mechanics along with entrepreneurs, investors and technology masterminds. With closed borders, the flow of talent to those businesses will slow and potentially stunt the growth of some of our economic mainstays.

In addition to established business, more than ever New Zealand needs innovation, start-ups and investment. Looking at the bigger picture, we need to consider which industries are going to sustain New Zealand in the longer term, and what minds are needed to develop them.

We are in the process of missing an enormous opportunity to embrace the skills and perspectives needed to complement and diversify the New Zealanders’ brains already here to drive our recovery in the Covid era.

This opportunity is New Zealand’s “brain gain”. It’s about time we started proactively welcoming these people both in our attitude and the planning/infrastructure we put in place to ensure they thrive.

Kea launched its global Welcome Home Survey in August and is seeking the help of New Zealanders to forward it to their compatriots offshore. Let’s encourage our overseas friends and family members to check in with NZ, and build an essential data set to enable New Zealand to better support them.

It’s time to change the narrative and to instead say to these returning New Zealanders, “nau mai, haere mai, welcome home”.