We don’t have a skills crisis. We have a training problem | Caleb Bond

If Covid did one good thing for Australia, it was exposing the real source of our alleged “skills shortage”, writes Caleb Bond.

We are apparently in the grips of a skills shortage.

Or, if you listen to employers, a worker shortage. Employers are advertising jobs that aren’t being filled because, we are told, there aren’t enough people to fill them.

The answer to that is supposedly to import more people into Australia and to do it quickly.

But it begs the question – if we don’t have enough people to fill the jobs to support the current population, then how many people do we actually need? And doesn’t shipping in workers – who need somewhere to live, a place to shop, and a school to send their kids to, create more demand? Thus necessitating even more jobs? In reality, Australia has always had a skills shortage. We’ve just plugged it with migrants who have already studied the things we’ve failed to teach Australians.

This became obvious once Covid-19 came along and the well of foreign workers dried up.

Yes, you could turn the immigration tap back on. And it would provide a short-term fix by filling jobs right now. But, in time, the influx of people would necessitate more demand on services that are already stretched. (Think the health system which, itself, is highly reliant on foreign workers.)

The point, though, is that we have done little to fix Australia’s skills shortage in decades. The unemployment rate may be the lowest in 50-odd years, but only because there’s no one else to employ.

Before Covid, many of those jobs were filled by qualified foreigners, while Australians who wanted work were frozen out because they didn’t have adequate qualifications.

The problem is not that we don’t have enough foreign workers – it’s that we don’t train our own workers properly. It’s a problem that has existed for a long time, but has only been exposed by Covid.

There is little scope for people to “upskill”, as they say in corporate speak. The way our education system is set up, people have to complete full studies such as certificates, diplomas and degrees to be recognised as qualified.

Assuming many people already have some qualification, why shouldn’t they be able to gain a “microcredential” (more corporate speak), which is basically an add-on in a particular skill that only takes a short period of study or training?

It would give the labour market a chance to respond to changes in demand in real time and encourage career progression.

Singapore, for instance, provides adults with a $500 annual credit to go towards skills training – and even more for over 40s.

Only 66 per cent of people aged 15-64 are either in work or looking for work, meaning a third of Australia’s working-age population is untapped. Many of these people will be unable to work full-time because of disabilities or families – but there is precious little encouragement for them to do any work at all.

The number of Year 11 and 12 students studying science, technology, engineering and maths – the jobs of the future – has flatlined at 10 per cent.

It’s not that we don’t have workers – we just don’t use them properly.