Located on Omahu Road Hastings, purposefully on the doorstep of Flaxmere where he grew up, local businessman Taurus Taurima’s Topline Training Academy is changing lives.
While his own story is inspirational and grounded in many of the challenges faced by the rangatahi his programme has been created for, Taurus has shown that with hard work, positive influence and role models, and determination lives can be changed, including his own.
The Topline Training Academy has been providing these life changing opportunities since July 2022 offering three intakes a year for 15 cadets each intake. The programme is 12 weeks long and is 80 percent practical hands-on training with employment guaranteed for graduates. The programme is people driven and was founded from a vision to facilitate generational change and make a positive contribution to whanau and community, and to address a local industry need for workers.
Taurus, a young Māori businessman, is all too aware that his people are over-represented in correction, unemployment, health, and education statistics. He knows this because he’s been there. Having turned his own life around, and being a man of action, he was compelled to do everything in his power to influence positive change for his people, even if he helped just one person, one whanau, one community. And so, the Topline Training Academy was born.
The programme needed to be flexible enough to cater for the specific needs of each group of cadets and be practical Topline Training Academy Intake No 1, 2024 based to work with the learning style of the cadets, all whilst delivering relevant industry qualifications and work experience. Committed to making cadets work ready, programme hours are the same hours typically worked in the civil construction and trades industries.
Work ethic, attendance, reliability are key learnings, and all cadets must be drug free by graduation. If they reach graduation, they are guaranteed employment. With the majority of cadets coming from challenging backgrounds, the Academy is a full immersion programme that engages whanau providing opportunities to not only positively impact the life of the cadet but the wider whanau too.
A full wrap around approach to pastoral care is central to the programme. Every cadet is different. Their needs and challenges are different, so the support required to set them on a good path is also different. Almost two years on, the Topline Training Academy successes speak for themselves.
The programme is results driven. It is not setup to make a profit or to provide Taurus’s core business Topline Contracting with workers. In fact, whilst the programme receives substantial funding for which Taurus is very grateful and acknowledges the Academy couldn’t run without, it is also financially supported by Taurus who covers any shortfall between funding and operating costs.
Graduates leave the programme and go to work for other local employers, with a small number remaining with Topline to either continue their growth journey, pathway into further formal qualifications or entry into the armed forces.
For Taurus, the programme must be successful for the people it was created to help, he has no hesitation stating that “if we’re not maintaining success, we’ll close it”.
So, what does success look like on the Topline Training Academy? Cadets graduating into meaningful employment is an obvious success. But it’s the success on a personal level that are the most impressive.
Like the cadet who is drug free for the first time in 35 years; the cadet who was on the verge of joining a gang but is now working and being a positive example to his daughter; the four brothers who have now all participated in the programme; and the cadet who hadn’t left his house in two years after a breakdown now a trade foreman.
In the words of the cadet’s and their whanau – “it gave me the reason not to give up”; “it helped me out of a dark hole”; “it’s a better direction for me, not just me but for my family too”; “Proud is an understatement”; “I have my son back”. These are the life changing successes that are repeated on every intake of the Academy.
It’s not surprising that the Topline Training Academy has been recognised by industry and business leaders, last year winning the Civil Contractors New Zealand National Training Company of the Year Award, and the Hawke’s Bay Chamber of Commerce Business Awards for Outstanding Social Impact and the Supreme Business Award.
