Expats hunting NZ jobs
Kea survey reveals untapped talent pool.
Wednesday, December 07 2011 || News || BY William Mace, Businessday.co.nz
A five-yearly online survey of more than 15,000 New Zealanders living overseas showed there was a highly educated workforce willing to reconnect with their Kiwi roots.
Twenty-seven per cent of respondents said they were currently job-seeking in New Zealand and as a result, KEA had developed a job-seeker site called www.keajobs.com to help match its 32,000-person network with New Zealand-based careers.
The survey, titled Every Kiwi Counts 2011, showed that overseas Kiwis are more highly educated - about seven times as likely to have a post-graduate qualification and almost three times as likely to have a Bachelor's degree.
The survey also showed 21 per cent of respondents believed a company or people they are involved with would be interested in developing deeper economic involvement with New Zealand or a New Zealand business.
Of those who said they would return to New Zealand, only 6 per cent said they planned to move back for general economic reasons while over 60 per cent listed family, lifestyle and the fact that New Zealand is "home" as motivating factors.
One in four respondents said they planned to return to New Zealand, but also planned to live somewhere else in the future.
Nearly 46 per cent of overseas-based Kiwis in the survey said that they earned over NZ$100,000 per annum while one in five aged over 50 earned more than $200,000 a year.
About two-thirds of respondents have financial interests in New Zealand, typically bank accounts and securities, while 20 per cent have equity investments, 18 per cent own a house, and 10 per cent own commercial property.
"Despite the interest in jobs in New Zealand, Every Kiwi Counts 2011 also found that less than one-quarter of overseas Kiwis plan to return to live in New Zealand permanently, which is why KEA also runs an active network enabling offshore New Zealanders to build tangible, constructive connections with home," said KEA New Zealand's global chief executive Dr Sue Watson.
At least 600,000 New Zealanders live overseas including almost one in four of all highly educated Kiwis, according to OECD figures.
However, the survey's authors noted that sample bias towards members of KEA New Zealand's network meant the survey could not be taken as representative of the entire population of Kiwis overseas.
