This week’s jobs and skills summit makes for easy headlines. More jobs. More skills. More cooperation. Less blame. But delivering on expectations provides an enormous early hurdle for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his government.
The fact that we have a critical shortage of workers and specific skills is not in doubt. But what sort of skills do we need? How do we compete with other countries trying to lure workers from the same catchments? And how do we know what is the next challenge on the jobs front?
A couple of years ago, few were predicting the crisis we now see in teaching — with a massive shortfall in numbers, areas of expertise and even the make-up between male and female educators. Would you have believed Commonwealth modelling, five years ago, showing that by 2025 we would need 85,000 more nurses — and 123,000 by 2030?
And what about some of those predictions relating directly to employment that have not eventuated? Some economists only a handful of years ago were warning that 47% of all jobs would disappear. We were told two decades ago that the paperless office would upend our work, and that we’d be driven to work by AI.
How will this summit navigate the COVID hill? Where will we source these predictions? What technologies will advance fastest? And what does Australia have to offer that will propel us ahead of Canada and America and a host of other nations facing the same economic problem?
Anthony Albanese says it’s about a “culture of cooperation” and he wants an end to the blame game. That sounds good, but it will not deliver teachers to classrooms, nurses to hospitals, workers to construction sites and technicians to labs.
Enterprise bargaining and broader industrial relations reform are crucial. Migration levels and how we adjust those are crucial. Providing a strategy that pivots and forecasts the shortages before they become critical is crucial.
But having clarity around the skills we need and the training to deliver them is paramount.
Take the example of the current crisis of care, where the shortages in the pink-collar workforce — nurses, teachers, childcare educators, aged and disability workers — are extreme. We need people who have the academic and physical skills to do those tasks.
Year 12s across the nation are beginning to focus on external exams, which will provide many with an ATAR ranking used to gain admission to different university courses. But many of the skills we are looking for — and this summit provides a wonderful opportunity to address — are not found on a physics paper or any apprenticeship on offer.
Imagine if we could use this crisis to disrupt education and training so that we also ensured the ironically called “soft skills” were given an increased priority.
An ATAR ranking doesn’t reflect teamwork. An apprenticeship doesn’t provide training in empathy. Leadership is ignored in the plethora of tests that universities now demand. So is time management, conflict resolution and having a stellar work ethic.
Perhaps communication is one of the most underrated skills of all. How does a health care professional communicate with a patient? A teacher with a student? A builder with his client? A banker with a mortgagee in distress?
The Times reported last week that the likely next British prime minister, Liz Truss, liked to set maths tests for civil servants at interviews: a question like what is a seventh minus an eighth?
But what does that prove? Nothing, as Greens Leader Adam Bandt made clear during the election campaign when he responded to a silly question about the current wage price index with: “Google it, mate.”
We’ve got to stop living in the past. We can’t keep repeating history. It’s easy to dismiss consideration of the “soft skills” because they are harder to mark. A jobs crisis can be fixed by plugging holes. And that might even lead to a few good headlines.
But is it a missed opportunity? And how could this summit be different to the 100 others that have been hosted in the same venue by a merry-go-round of leaders?
We have too much communication with no production that is the actual problem – Half baked skilled workers but beautiful communicators actually don’t get the job done.
Interesting, few points including data literacy or working with numbers, soft skills including problem solving and hidden curriculum based on Bloom’s Taxonomy, especially higher education.
‘Would you have believed Commonwealth modelling, five years ago, showing that by 2025 we would need 85,000 more nurses — and 123,000 by 2030?’
I do, by ignoring the nativist fueled ABS/UNPD derived data i.e. the ‘nebulous’ (Ian Dunt UK) NOM net overseas migration expanded in 2006 capturing more temporary churn over of e.g. students, but falsely described by ‘Australia’s best demographer’ as ‘immigrants’ for a dog whistle, and missed by all media…. OECD data would have shown working age trends in decline a generation ago.
Soft skills, or as described on job descriptions, ‘personal attributes’ are essential not for a specific occupation or career, but to allow people to move round jobs and occupations more easily; also essential for empowering civil society and community. One of the important ones is problem solving or analysis, which are missing from skill sets in less developed nations, intentionally.
Not only for unskilled or vocational but part of Bloom’s Taxonomy underpinning curricula in schools, vocational and higher education i.e. knowledge, understanding, application, analysis, evaluation and synthesis or creativity; the latter three higher level skills often described generically as ‘analysis’ are under attack by authoritarians of the right, to preclude empowerment and challenges e.g. climate science, women, minorities etc..
Why? I can barely get my work done as it is with the amount of reviews, roundtables, workshops, one-on-one’s and various other opportunities to set goals for later review, meetings in person, on zoom, teams, customer feedback requests, classdojo updates from teachers, seesaw from childcare, xplor after school … it’s utter peak communication. You have got to be joking! Teachers can’t teach and nurses are frustrated because they are stuck in endless administration which is all just communicating performance, data, metrics etc. How about less talk more action? I find it all so exhausting, counter-productive and performative. The ‘soft skill’ is not in truly communicating. That is done organically, it doesn’t have to be manufactured with infantilising group activities making tasks more difficult than they need to be. Students are overwhelmed with group activities in high school, my son is anyway. The extraverts are in charge and those of us who don’t love talking all the time find this way of operating at our best. It’s difficult to concentrate and produce real quality ideas if we are constantly having to articulate the process. Teamwork is for games, sports and where it’s necessary to work in teams. Communication, as a ‘soft skill’ inhibits the formation of relationships built on trust and honesty. It prioritises performing socially rewarding styles of interaction which are really just personality traits. I can’t disagree more strongly. What we need are hard skills.
That is no longer possible because the ‘hard skills’ like truth & honesty are considered to be insufficiently inclusive of those incapable of anything other than emoting and being supportive of frailty.
Perhaps a modest training levy would help employers large and small resume responsibility for training and developing their workforces, so that staff become more productive over time.
Australia briefly had a National Training Guarantee, which was a very low levy collected from payrolls to fund workplace development. It was introduced by the Keating Government and scrapped by its successor.
Singapore has had a Skills Levy in place for years. It’s capped at SGD$11.25 per month but is often lower. Proceeds go to a Skill Development Fund, which is used to pay training grants to employers or upgrading programs to the workforce more generally. Frankly it seems like far less of a dog’s breakfast than user-pays vocational education and training, or user-pays higher education.
The Training Guarantee was flawed as it only required employers to pay up if they did not spend the required amount on training. The result was some good training, but also a lot of rorting by calling things like management retreats training.
If this area was to be revisited it would be best to go for a straight out levy on employers based on a fixed proportion of payroll. It could then be spent on training generally, or funneled back to training in each industry based on the amount collected form that industry.
Skilled apprenticeships have remained static for decades around 3% of 16-25yr olds but “non skills training” has risen in the last 20yrs from negligible to over 6% of that cohort.
Can’t imagine that entails anything other than wasted days drowsing over butcher paper due to the fumes from textas.
The so called user-pays system has actually become a federal govt pays system as employers continue to shirk responsibility for training their workforces…
C’mon one seventh minus one eighth is simple. It’s one fifty-sixth. Multiply the two denominators to find the common denominators and as both are unitary nominators in the original question the nominator in the answer will automatically resolve to one.
FFS, this is year 9 maths.
Year 9?
Dunno what that equates to in old money – my first year high school class did it routinely in 1960, all having learned the principle in 6th class primary.