Jobs and Skills Australia’s latest Occupation Shortage Report: March quarter 2025 is a detailed piece of analysis aligning data from JSA’s Survey of Employers who have Recently Advertised (SERA).
It examines “the percentage of vacancies employers advertised that were filled. The metric is calculated by dividing the number of filled vacancies by total advertised vacancies.”
What it provides for VET and higher education providers, and governments, are details of which occupations employers find difficult to fill – because there are not enough skilled applicants and conversely the occupations where employers find plenty of skilled graduates when they advertise vacancies.
The following VET-related occupations are in oversupply (i.e., more than enough skilled applicants) in metropolitan areas:
- keyboard operators
- ICT support technicians
- multimedia specialists and web developers
- ICT managers, and
- finance managers.
In regional areas the oversupply is in:
- industrial mechanical and production engineers
- hotel service managers
- receptionists
- delivery drivers, and
- finance managers.
By contrast – the largest employing occupational groups which are undersupplied in terms of skilled graduates (i.e., where employers in these large employing groups are not seeing enough skilled graduates when they advertise and where VET and higher education providers could therefore look to expand their course offerings) are:
- registered nurses
- retail managers
- truck drivers
- electricians, and
- child carers.
As JSA notes there are different reasons for an undersupply of skilled applicants for vacant roles and one of these is a ‘long training gap’. That is, it takes a long time to train people for some occupations and this is a key driver in the analysis of the problems employers report experiencing.
Finally, the report also details a gender factor in imbalances in the number of applicants per vacancy. Occupations which have a high proportion (over 80%) of male or female workers frequently have below average numbers of applicants for each vacancy. This is particularly the case in female-dominated occupations (e.g. health and early childhood).
