Adaptation & Specialisation: An interview with Techtorium CEO, Jan Hutchinson
Jan Hutchinson reflects, taking a balcony view on her industry and her leadership during the past year and preparing for what’s to come.
1. 2020 has been a challenging year in many ways. What has changed - and remained the same - in your industry?
For Techtorium, the impact has been minimal because we've predominantly concentrated on our domestic students. For other tertiary providers, universities, all the way through to PTEs (private training establishments), even the secondary schools actually, where they have relied on the money coming through from international students, they have struggled. It’s been quite difficult.
We’ve also been delivering classes through Zoom for about three years for one or two days a week so it was very easy for us to transition into online training full-time. Whether our students are sitting in a classroom or are at home attending a virtual class, they have a trainer in front of them. They can collaborate with other students. They can talk with the trainer. It’s a regular classroom for them.
After the Christchurch earthquakes in 2011, one of the learnings was that we need to be prepared for not having access to our campus. We know that if young people can’t get back into their education quickly, they can disengage and become what we call NEETs (not in education, employment, or training).
So since then we’ve had a plan that meant we could get premises, we could get equipment, and we established a policy for each student to have their own device. Our ability to adapt quickly to the impacts of COVID was actually a result of changes we made after the earthquakes.
For the tertiary sector overall, an issue that’s cropped up is many secondary school students not having a chance to collect the credits they need for university entrance. In response, some universities have reduced the credit requirements for those students.
There are also a lot of households in New Zealand that don’t have an internet connection and/or don’t have enough devices to enable parents to keep working and children to keep furthering their education. That’s been a real challenge for the government.
“Our ability to adapt quickly to the impacts of COVID was actually a result of changes we made after the Christchurch earthquakes.”
2. What has changed - and remained the same - for you as a leader this year?
As a leader, I think one of the first things that we did when we could see the pandemic coming was to look quickly at what we could do to keep our staff and students safe. So 10 days before the lockdown in March, we already sent our most vulnerable staff home. Since they all had laptops, that was really easy.
Setting up dual-delivery — so that we could deliver classes that accommodated both onsite and remote staff and students — was a big change. We had to set up our learning spaces so that we had cameras and microphones and so forth.
Another change was that we met more regularly as a whole staff. For the first week in lockdown, we spoke to every staff member and every student every day to make sure they were okay. I had a register of staff members names that I would check every day to make sure we had touched base with everybody, that they had what they needed, and they were doing okay.
3. Looking back at how you've steered your organisation through COVID-19, what would you consider your proudest achievement as a leader?
We have what we call the triple A's for our students, which we rate them on, and they rate themselves on: attendance, achievement, and attitude. Because we're vocational, it's about getting them to employment. We've always had good attendance, overall sitting up at the high 80s and 90 percents, but this year it's shot right up to about 96 percent.
So what I'm most proud of is that the team kept the students engaged in such a way that was really meaningful for the students, actually, because some of them were faced with all sorts of struggles.
Looks like my mokopuna’s just arrived…
[Note from the interviewer: This interview was conducted online via Zoom and Jan’s grandson entered her office for a moment of cuddles before we resumed our conversation.]
That is another example of what we discovered through lockdown. That staff who have school-aged children or younger children or other dependents at home, we could not expect them to put in an eight-hour day because they were also caregivers. So we became very fluid about that. It was okay for people to say, ‘I'm not available at this time,’ so that they could role-share with their partners or have time to put The Wiggles on.
We got to know everybody's kids, who has a barking dog…all that personal stuff we got to see. It's very humanising and it really promotes good collaboration amongst staff.
Now we don't measure the number of hours an employee works, we measure the productivity. That is a better measure because feedback from our staff confirms that they love the flexibility of being able to put a load of washing on while they're doing their work.
“It’s very humanising and it really promotes good collaboration amongst staff.”
4. How are you taking care of yourself?
I'm not really good at doing that anyway but I'm lucky enough to work with my partner, my husband. He's amazing. He feeds me, pulls me away from the desk, and does those sorts of things. Working from home has allowed me to improve that.
Another one is that little boy you saw. I’m taking care of the mokopuna twice a week now so I’m walking more because the little boy likes going for walks.
Now that I’m working from home more, I’m also getting more time to think big picture. When I’m in the office, my office door can be like a revolving door. I love my job and being at work and I miss the people I work with when I’m not in the office all the time. But I know that it's better for me, and it's actually better for the organisation given the role that I play in it.
“I’m getting more time to think big picture. It’s better for me, and it’s better for the organisation given the role I play in it.”
5. What's your greatest fear looking out at the next 6-12 months? Your greatest leadership challenge or opportunity?
I think the fear is always going to be around what's coming next. Are we ready for it? One of the things that we felt very sure about was that we needed to reassure the staff in the beginning that we are funded. So we're in an enviable position in that the government said the funding won't be affected if we don't get the same student numbers. So we were able, right from the outset, to tell our staff that their jobs were safe. My husband and I took a pay cut, but none of the staff had any effect on their income and we really wanted to do that upfront because we just felt that that helps going forward.
One of the things about the economy that could impact us, obviously, is the job market. As we’ve seen in previous recessions, as jobs go, people slimline. People in senior roles may take a middle management role. A middle manager may take a much more junior role. The ripple effect is that it can keep graduates out of the job market. So building Techtorium’s relationships with our industry partners and keeping those really warm is important.
I think keeping students engaged is also really important, particularly those who are living on the poverty line, because a lot of them feel that they need to go out and work to help support the family, especially if they have family members who were in the tourism industry or hospitality. We need to continue to build flexibility into our programmes to adapt to the evolving needs of our students.
With the international student market halting the way it has, it’s meant that a lot of other tertiary providers are now focusing more on recruiting domestic students. So we need to make sure we're on our game and that we know what's going on around us.
Knowing who we are and where Techtorium sits in the market is important. We’ve always been about a learning environment. No walls, lots of collaboration, lots of project-based work, and real-life experiences to make our graduates job-ready. We also focus on connected classrooms, where students have scheduled classes with a trainer in front of them.
One of the advantages of being a boutique, highly specialised education provider is that we’re very flexible. When we talk to one of our industry partners who says, ‘Hey, we need a graduate who can do this and this,’ we can put it into the curriculum that day. We know that works well because the employment rate for our graduates is in the high nineties and that's very important to us.
The biggest problem is we hide our light under a bushel! We do need to scream it from the rooftops a bit more. Next year will see us doing that.
“We need to make sure we’re on our game and that we know what’s going on around us.”
6. Imagine a phone call from New Zealand’s Prime Minister asking you, ‘What's your best advice for me right now on [your industry]?’ What would you say? What first step would you recommend?
Keeping standards high. They need to continue to invest in the infrastructure that supports learning for our students. I was so impressed when they rolled out this project to get devices to all students who didn't have them, but, obviously, that was a big ask in a short space of time. I'd really like them to continue with that process.
I will tell you a story that is heart-warming and really meant quite a lot to us.
We do short courses for secondary schools in the holidays. Of course, during lockdown people couldn't send these students to us so we offered the courses remotely.
During the level four lockdown, we had a student this year who, when the trainer asked, ‘Where are you? Are you sitting out in the garden?’, he said, ‘No. I'm sitting under a tree in my school field so that I can use their internet connection. But my device isn't going to stay charged up long enough to last the whole class.’ So when his device went flat he put his phone on and finished his class doing all sorts of things on a tiny keyboard on his phone.
Now, that 16 year old who was really motivated to get through that course and do well — as heart-warming as that is — we should never make students have to work so hard to get their education. It should be just there for them.
There was a scheme that the government put together in Glenn Innes that made internet free for all school-aged kids, and the schools issued them with devices. So these are families who would not have had any connectivity — many of them not even a mobile phone. That scheme helps level the playing field so continuing to invest in those sorts of initiatives is really, really important.
7. What are your top priorities for 2021?
Continuing to build capacity to deliver our courses outside of Auckland, and doing that more remotely rather than by opening campuses. That's going to be a game changer in the regions, especially in the regions where there are a high number of NEETs.
Imagine places like Gisborne where there are high numbers of Māori students not getting the same access to tertiary education because of their remoteness. We don’t want to necessarily uproot all these kids to come and live in Auckland for three years while they study because there’s a risk they’ll stay when there are jobs in the regions that need to be filled.
We want to really support the regions as much as we can so that's definitely a big priority for us, getting out into the regions in a way that is different.
8. In what ways do you think you and your people need to change or grow in order for your organisation to be successful in 2021 and beyond?
I think all of our staff and students are great ambassadors for what we do so we're promoting and encouraging that more. Next year there'll be some investment on personal networking and being confident about talking about what you do at work and putting it out there because I think that's the biggest one for us is to just be tall and proud.
It's not that we've never been proud of what we do, it's that there's a culture of being humble at Techtorium. I mean, I can say to you right now, we're the highest performing IT tertiary education provider in New Zealand. We have been for about the last 8 or 10 years. We lead all the other providers in terms of course completion, qual completions, and employment rates. We just need to stop hiding our light under a bushel.
The last thing I would add is that we have really thrived in a more innovative working environment. We talk about having an innovative learning environment, but I think the staff and certainly the leaders, we've really thrived in that innovative working environment. We're loving it. We're keeping it.
“We’ve really thrived in that innovative working environment. We’re loving it. We’re keeping it.”