Locals have some advantage in gaining ski field jobs

Ruapehu Bulletin, Volume 7, Issue 365, 4 December 1990, Page 4

Locals have some advantage in gaining ski field jobs

BY

CHRIS

ERSON

Turoa Skifield wants to employ more local people with the right skills next season.

One reason for this is that the more local people they employ the more accommodation is left available for paying skiers. Locals therefore have an advantage when applying for work. However, the majority of job applications received by Turoa this year came from people outside the district. Of those locals who did apply, half were successful in getting work, although Turoa's financial controller Angus

Grimwade said that some of the locals interview skills were below average. Jan Lawton of the Ohakune NZ Employment Service agrees. She sat in on most of the interviews which she described as "very fair". She said that while some of the local applicants were simply not suitable for the work, there were a significant number who just needed to improve their interview skills and would be great on the skifields or in associated areas such as motels and restaurants. Ms Lawton also thought that some of the locals were disadvantaged by not

being skiers. "Its hard to know what a lift operator does if you've never seen one," she said. Obviously if people are not skiers there is less incentive to work on the slopes in the first place. Perks such as free staff skiing are often what entices outsiders. However this may be changing due to the school skiing programmes which have now been operating a number of years. They are in the midst of breeding a whole generation of locals who will have given skiing a go. Next year Ms Lawton would like to run a programme to teach applicants about the different jobs available and how to better conduct themselves in an interview. She said that Maori in

particular sometimes prefer to demonstrate their skills rather than talk about them, and that they sometimes prefer to not look the interviewer in the eye as a sign of respect. She suggests that in these cases a good CV is very useful. At Whakapapa accommodation is even more scarce and they therefore employ a large number of locals. "Some locals begin with a 'snotty-skiers-in-their-BMWs' type of attitude, but it doesn't last for long," said Whakapapa staff coordinator Pamela Stirling. She says the locals work hard, relate well to the skiers and often, if they are not already, become good skiers themselves.