Careers options from big green bus

A big green mobile careers coach rolled through the King Country last week offering on board careers information and opportunities for students and jobseekers.

The 15 metre-long Inzone careers coach has 26 on-board interactive, digital kiosks with each person able to use them to select their own vocational pathway.

It is an initiative by Peter and Donna Doake who had the bus built after their free motivational shows began to be commercially exploited by the very schools they were offering the free service to.

The shows were intended to inspire students to give life a go and not worry about the ups and the downs. They were presented with the aid of costumes and examples from the lives of the presenters.

Peter and Donna funded it and the show went right through New Zealand and was seen by about 300,000 students.

“The teachers couldn’t believe how we could hold their attention for an hour and a quarter,” Peter said.  

Peter stopped the free motivational shows on learning some schools were charging their students to see it.

“Which really got up my goat, it wasn’t the way we intended it,” Peter said.

They would turn up to schools to see 150 students outside a school hall, because they hadn’t brought $2 from home, and they were the very students Peter thought would have benefited greatly from the motivational show.

He took headmasters to task about it – and decided to spend another million dollars on the design and build of the careers coach.

The bus rolls up to a rural school and in 10 minutes it is set up, the slide out sides have expanded out and the interior is transformed with rows of kiosks along the sides and down the middle. In a normal school day 26 students pass through the bus every 25 minutes using their time on the kiosk to access career and education information.

“When I designed and built the first kiosk I put one into Rotorua Boys, and the most hits for further information was for salmon farming in the Marlborough Sounds,” he said.  

“And yet they were in the middle of the island, nowhere near a coast, nowhere near a port.”

He asked to interview the boys who hit on salmon farming, why salmon farming?

“The boys said ‘we were raised around rivers and lakes, we are used to trout fishing and we didn’t know that job existed. If you get paid that sort of money for that sort of thing, we’ll do it.’  

“That really gave me a lot of satisfaction.  What they don’t know, they don’t know. If we can get more content on here of where they can go and get training. The better and more powerful the kiosk, a one stop shop, very private with the headset on. Nobody’s looking over their shoulder.

“Now of course in the first year we funded it again ourselves, but then organisations like the defence force and even people like Mike Pero said we would like to help sponsor you. So that’s kind of what you see in here – defence force, fishing, horticulture.

“Part of the reason I built it is to go to the rural towns. The satisfaction you get from schools that might only have a hundred or so students. It’s cool because we know we are doing good things, we are getting great support.”

There was an Inzone kiosk at Ōtorohanga College, and Peter was keen to get more kiosks sponsored into schools.  

“Because they have the download capability, each kiosk is updated with the rest as they all remain linked with a server on the bus. They stand alone exactly the same but it means there’s something they can go back to, and they do go back.”

When each person logs out they can have a record of their search making it easy to start up where they left off on a previous session.

“It’s a way of connecting them. We can’t do everything,” he said.

He thinks in future there is no reason why the kiosks can’t have a push to talk function with involved industries.

“We are looking at that now,” he said.

“We really get a lot of interest in the trades.  The last few years there is more interest in trades than university. There’s a lot of companies spending a lot of money on R&D but not much on staff recruitment, training of staff.”

The Ministry of Social Development and the Mayors’ Task Force for Jobs has been helping arrange sponsorship for kiosks, he said.

The recent King Country visit of the purpose-built coach was co-ordinated by Connected Employment Liaison Advisor (ELA) Briar Hickling who said it was unique in lots of different ways.    

“Young people respond well to digital video and in the Inzone Careers Coach. They each get 25 minutes at a kiosk to select information that’s the most relevant to the jobs and career they’re interested in,” she said.  

“It’s individual to them and they can choose what sectors and work opportunities they want to learn more about.  They are learning by doing with the information also aligned with the vocational pathways which cover the six industry sectors.”  

It was a no cost event where local training providers, tertiary institutions, employers and employment support organisations were on hand to provide regionally specific information.  

The bus and a five-screen simulator were at Te Kūiti High School for local schools last Wednesday, where 350 students were expected to experience the coach and take advantage of the virtual reality IVS Heavy Vehicle Simulator which was also on site.

The five-screen simulator has modules for forklift, empty container handler, reach stacker and heavy lift training modules. Under its Safe and Well brand, IVS training developed models to suit industry participants.

The following day the bus and simulator was at the Waitomo Library for the general public, before travelling to Ōtorohanga.

The careers coach has also been getting involved with MSD, Peter said, which resulted in the coach being contracted to visit 24 locations during the current tour.

“We don’t charge a lease for the coach, we still donate that, Peter said. In July when they fund us to appear at a school, the school’s not paying.  

“Total Power has given us a generator; we still have to pay diesel for that. That’s where all the contributors help.

“I don’t want it to be something that disappears when we get too old to run it. I always had this vison of, could make I economically viable?”

The rewards though are not economic. Peter still remembers coming out of an interview on TV1’s Breakfast show and being accosted by a girl from a van load that had just pulled up.  

When he admitted being Peter Doake she said she just wanted to give him a big hug.

She had studied drama all her life and given it up in year 10 or 11, until she saw the motivational show in Rotorua with its main focus on not giving up on what people were passionate about.

She took up drama again. She was about to be interviewed because she was second lead in the film Whale Rider.

She was a movie star.

“It was a fence at the top of the cliff for a lot of young people in NZ,” Peter said.  

“Now what you see today is the careers coach and a way of getting to people.”