Unity says
Every working day, millions of New Zealanders head off to do jobs that keep the country moving. Some jobs are glamorous. Most are not. All of them matter. Today we're going to look at the world of work — and what it really means.
📖The story
Read this story together.
Ask everyone to think about a job they might want to do one day before you start.
Unity spent a week trying different jobs. On Monday she helped a plumber fix a burst pipe. On Tuesday she assisted a nurse on a busy hospital ward. On Wednesday she drove a delivery truck across Auckland in peak-hour traffic. On Thursday she worked in a primary school classroom. On Friday she helped a software developer fix a bug in an app used by thousands of people.
Every single day she came home exhausted. Every single day she came home having learned something new.
New Zealand's economy runs on work. Some people work in offices. Some work outdoors. Some work with their hands. Some work with their minds. Some work in large organisations with hundreds of colleagues. Some work alone, running their own small businesses from a spare bedroom or a garage.
The jobs New Zealand needs are changing. Technology is automating some tasks that people used to do — checkout operators, data entry clerks, some kinds of driving. At the same time, new jobs are being created that did not exist ten years ago — social media managers, drone operators, data scientists, sustainability consultants.
What stays constant is this: every job involves solving a problem for someone else. The plumber solves a water problem. The nurse solves a health problem. The teacher solves a learning problem. The software developer solves a technology problem. When you think about work that way, the question of what job you want becomes a different question: whose problem do you most want to solve?
"The best jobs," said Unity at the end of the week, "are the ones where you go home knowing you made something better."
💬Talk and think
The third question is a genuinely interesting one for adults too — take your time with it.
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What job do you think you might like to do one day — and whose problem would it solve?
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What is the difference between a job you do for money and work you do because it matters to you?
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What skills do you think will be most important for jobs in the future — and how can you start building them now?
🔍Explore more
Take a few minutes to read through these facts.
The changing nature of work is one of the big themes of the next decade — good to start thinking about it early.
- Workforce size: Around 2.8 million New Zealanders are employed
- Most common sectors: Health, retail, construction, education, and agriculture
- Small business: Around 97% of NZ businesses are small businesses — fewer than 20 staff
- Self-employment: Around 1 in 6 working New Zealanders works for themselves
- Changing jobs: Most people today will have many different careers in their lifetime
- Future skills: Critical thinking, creativity, communication, and adaptability are consistently ranked most important
🤝Job interview at home
Fun and surprisingly revealing — kids often have very clear ideas about what they want to do and why.
Take turns interviewing each other for a made-up job. The interviewer asks three questions: What can you do well? What do you find hard? What problem would you most like to solve for people?
Listen properly to the answers. Then swap. Adults should do this too — genuinely, not just going through the motions.
Afterwards, talk about what the exercise revealed. Did anyone surprise you?
