The ageing society has been attracting the attention of policy-makers in Australia and in many other countries. This paper considers the labour market for the traditional trades in Australia over the next 40 years and investigates whether the ageing society will pose a workforce problem. The broad conclusion is that the ageing society will significantly impact on the size of the potential trades workforce, but that this is unlikely to result in shortages. Rather, any shortage is more likely to occur if the trades lose their attractiveness relative to other occupations. Moreover, the age distribution of the trades workforce will remain largely unaltered.
One of the most striking features of the modern world is its changing demographic profile. In almost any policy arena, the issue of demographic change (or ageing) sits alongside globalisation, climate change and the knowledge revolution as areas which are transforming societies, including the ways in which we organise and go about our work activities. This significant and worldwide phenomenon motivated an international meeting of a number of technical and vocational education and training (TVET) research agencies, hosted by NCVER in October 2006. This publication is the result of this meeting and contains the presented papers and comments by discussants. What emerges from the papers is a picture of a worldwide trend that touches many aspects of TVET and the labour market, but one which needs to take into account the very different economies and societies of the world.
Vocational education and training (VET) is much more important to young people than might be immediately apparent. This paper focuses on how young people participate in vocational education and training, what they study and their outcomes. Of particular note is the importance of VET for those young people who do not proceed on the conventional academic path of 12 years of school followed by university.
Using wage data from the Student Outcomes Survey, this study examines whether there is a pay off to actually completing a vocational education and training (VET) qualification, noting that many VET students do not complete full qualifications.
This paper models completions for traditional apprenticeships on the basis of commencements from 1995 to 2005. These models are used to understand the dynamics of the relationship between commencements and completions in order to predict the number of future completions. On the basis of the models, it is expected that completions will increase in the future. The models allow the paper to comment on the variation in completion rates across states/territories and changes in them over time.