Opinion piece
By Rod Camm
In an effort to inform the development of policies promoting close collaboration between industry and the education and training sector NCVER is currently finalising research on five key growth industries for which Australia needs to prepare its workforce.
The industry areas under consideration are food and agriculture; biotechnology and pharmaceuticals; oil and gas; mining equipment, technology and services (METS); and advanced manufacturing.
Through a review of the available data and literature the study concentrates on the role education and training plays to help ensure these industries have the available people with the right skills to realise opportunities presenting themselves; noting this must go hand-in hand with other interventions by governments and industry.
The question of how ready the Australian training sector is to meet demand for skills has no straightforward answer. What we do know is the role of employers is crucial: in the workplace and in partnerships with schools, VET institutions, universities and research organisations.
A predominant theme in the literature is the need to develop a more nimble workforce able to manage change and capitalise on innovation. Some particular problems are also clear: in agriculture and manufacturing, older low-skilled workers will need retraining to be able to find decent jobs in their changing industries. In emerging industries, universities and businesses will have to cooperate to ensure a supply of appropriately skilled graduates.
All sectors will need to collaborate to maximise the incorporation of R&D into enterprise behaviour, to improve their capacity to manage and to operate in Asia and beyond. Workers in these (and other) fields must have good STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) skills.
Clear categorisation of these industries, the occupations within them and the skills required is not easy. This is because of the diversity of organisations, the range of industries they service and the outputs generated, as well as the degree of overlap between each. This calls for a new way of thinking about skill demand and presents a challenge for data collection.
Emerging job profiles will require generic skills that are attractive across the labour market. For those workers equipped with the right skills, job mobility will be easier. They will be better able to choose work that pays better or suits their circumstances. Employers therefore will have to offer attractive working conditions and learning opportunities, and ensure that their recruitment strategies efficiently attract, select and retain talent.
A crude division of responsibility for training in the future will be for educational institutions at secondary and tertiary level to provide a sound general education, including language, literacy and numeracy (LLN) and STEM, as well as underpinning knowledge in specific subject areas; with enterprises preparing graduates for particular jobs and fostering workplace learning, continuing professional development and cooperation in the innovation cycle. Serious work placements are effective for all students, whether at school, in VET or at university. These solutions are not cheap.
There has been much discussion in recent years about skills mismatches. In a deregulated tertiary education system there will be heightened imperative to ensure students are provided with the right skills needed in the labour market. It would be a mistake to interpret this too narrowly: also required is education and training that, to quote the World Economic Forum (2014, p.5 ), generates ‘the necessary dynamism to generate new jobs’.
To meet the demand for skilled labour, employers will need to look beyond traditional pools of workers. This requires employment and educational policies that encourage the participation of women and older workers, as well as conditions that continue to attract skilled migrants. Labour mobility is another solution noting the more highly skilled a worker is the greater potential there is for geographic mobility.
In his keynote address to the National Skills Summit in Canberra on 25 June the Minister for Industry, The Hon Ian Macfarlane, confirmed the increased role Australian industry will play in reforming the VET sector. This project aims to further inform government, industry and the training sectors to encourage greater collaboration and to enable adequate skills development of the identified five industry growth areas.
Readiness to meet demand: a study of five key industry growth areas by Francesca Beddie, Francesca Beddie & Associates and Mette Creaser & Adrian Ong, NCVER is due to be released in the coming months.
Sources:
- Matching Skills and Labour Market Report 2014
- Media release: Industry-led VET reform to drive productivity gains