The National Skills Commission published its state of Australian skills report in early December 2021.
It found that Australia’s workforce is changing as “the labour market responds to big forces like an ongoing shift to services and higher skilled jobs, advances in technology and growing automation.” These shifts emphasise the importance of effective further education and training.
Skills for Today and Tomorrow
A recent NSC report: State of Australia’s Skills 2021: now and into the future is worth looking at. It focuses on the skills workers need in today’s labour market as well as the emerging skills in the jobs of the future. In addition, a Labour Market update has also been developed to support the report along with an outline of Australia’s emerging skills based on online job advertisements. Finally, Australian Jobs 2021 – published in September last year, looks at jobs by location, industry, occupation and occupation level as well as providing some labour market insights.
According to the state of Australian skills report, some of the most important and rapidly growing skills needs over the coming years are:
- “care – the group of skills responding to demographic change, such as the ageing of the population
- computing – a group of skills needed to respond to the digital world and the increasing use of digital technologies across the entire economy
- cognitive abilities – the group of advanced reasoning and higher order skills computers cannot easily replace, especially non-routine cognitive skills
- communication – the group of skills needed to collaborate and engage within and across workplaces.”
It also finds that data and digital skills are the fastest growing skills required by employers. It notes that:
“Other examples of skills that are increasing in importance include enterprise resource planning (ERP), social media, infection control, patient care and graphic and visual design. These skills are changing the way we do our jobs.”
If you don’t want to tackle the whole report, the NSC has prepared a report overview. It’s about 25 pages long and emphasises the strong growth in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) skills.
It also points to the strong move to service-based occupations over the last 20 years and particularly health care and social assistance (rising by 977,400 or 119.4%) as well as:
- “professional, scientific and technical services – up 601,500 or 106.2%
- education and training – up 506,700 or 81.9%
- construction – up 499,000 or 72.9%
- public administration and safety – up 353,700 or 75.1%.”
This overview emphasises strong growths in female and mature age employment and participation and the need for young people to spend longer in education in response to higher skills needs (This is reflected by a considerable rise in the proportion of young people in full-time education, from around 32% in February 1988 to 53% in early 2020) coupled with structural changes away from manufacturing and lower skilled entry-level jobs.
Employers have changed the approaches and expectations on recruitment too, including “hiring applicants with experience even if they were not as qualified as the employer wanted, or taking on people who demonstrated enthusiasm or a willingness to learn on the job.”
Finally, you may want to grab a look at the NSC’s skills priority occupation reports based on major occupational groups from managers and professional to labourers as well as providing information on ANZSCO (Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations) Sub-Major Occupation Groups.
