Report reveals what jobs and skills will be in demand in Australia by 2025
A new report reveals the skills you’ll need to succeed at work in the next few years – with a key gap identified where most Australians are lacking.
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Nearly one-third of employees have experienced changes in their job over the past year during the pandemic.
While around 300,000 jobs were lost since the beginning of 2020 on the back of COVID-19, the ones that are coming back are not the same as businesses look to grow in new ways and create jobs that didn’t exist before the pandemic.
A recent study conducted jointly by RMIT Online and Deloitte on “the future of work” has revealed that digital literacy skills will be in high demand in Australia in the next few years.
Australia will need 156,000 more digital technology workers by 2025, representing one in four jobs created during that period, according to the study.
The study reveals that there is a significant digital skills gap that needs to be filled, with about 87 per cent of jobs in Australia requiring digital literacy skills.
Addressing the gap will help businesses in the technology, media and telecommunications industry grow by $10 billion by 2025, the study revealed.
Since the pandemic broke out, the use of technology for work, education, healthcare and
business has soared, creating new demand for more workers who are skilled up in technology.
The Deloitte Access Economics study showed that 35 per cent of surveyed Australians experienced a work change during the crisis, including starting a new job, losing a job, starting studying, gaining a promotion or starting a business. Meanwhile, around a third said their day-to-day tasks are different since the onset of COVID-19.
During COVID-19, jobs with programming skills, maths, tech design and analysing data or information were among the fastest growing.
Looking forward, it is expected that one in four jobs created between now and 2025 will be for technology workers, with around 156,000 more technology workers needed in the Australian workforce than there were in 2019.
While job requirements have changed in the past year, less than one in five surveyed Australians said they learned a new skill during the pandemic that is relevant to their job. One in four of those surveyed said that they had not undertaken any training or learning in the last year.
Four in five Australian business leaders surveyed believed that adopting new technologies is important in order to achieve business goals.
“The last year has shown the need for great leadership, this was the main focus that helped teams thrive during the pandemic. I also see digital acumen and digital literacy as skills that we’ll need more and more of,” Optus director of leadership, culture and capability Jane Peter said.
“It won’t just be about individuals who understand it, it will be about having employees who can set it up, teach it and know how we can leverage it. Behavioural and leadership skills will also be increasingly important.”
One quarter of employees surveyed report that their data analysis skills are not at the level required or are outdated compared with their employer’s requirements.
The research revealed that more than half of Australians have little to no understanding of coding, blockchain, artificial intelligence and data visualisation, and less than 5 per cent of those surveyed said that they would be comfortable working in these tech-heavy areas. However, three out of four Australians said they want to learn about emerging technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.
While more than 20 per cent of Australians surveyed think there is a possibility that they will be made redundant, 50,600 Australians reported lacking necessary skills or education as their main difficulty in finding work.
Digital training can also help employees earn more – with an employee transitioning from
professional services to a technology role able to achieve an average wage premium of over $10,000 per year.
The biggest skills gap is in data analysis but, of those that need it for their work, 30 per cent of those surveyed report that their data analysis skills are not at the level required or are outdated.
The study showed that one in four of those surveyed said that they had not undertaken any training or learning in the last year.
The average working Australian spends over 150 hours on learning each year but 47 per cent of people don’t find this training relevant to their job or find it didn’t teach them anything new. This suggests that the average Australian could be wasting 10 working days each year on training or learning that isn’t relevant to their job.
According to the survey results, over half of Australian workers would choose additional training worth $1000 over free lunches at work, and one in five would choose it over a pay increase of $50 per week.
Originally published as Report reveals what jobs and skills will be in demand in Australia by 2025
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