Australia must teach young people technology skills, says WiseTech’s Richard White

Australia must ‘break the mould’ in education to ensure more young people learn technology skills, says tech billionaire Richard White.

WiseTech CEO Richard White. Picture: John Feder

Richard White, one of Australia’s most successful tech entrepreneurs, told the Economic and Social Outlook Conference on Thursday it was “incredibly wasteful” for Australian companies to be forced to use overseas talent to fill their need for technology skills.

Mr White, founder and CEO of $20bn logistics software company WiseTech Global, said Australia needed to “break the mould” and use “non-traditional thinking” to succeed in giving more young people tech skills.

He told the conference technology companies were Australia’s economic future, and they were driven by education. But the lack of trained technology talent meant our companies were at war with each other to secure skills.

“If you haven’t got the talent in the economy, you have to fight for the last person standing … you are fighting over scraps,” Mr White said. The other option was to import talent “but as a continuous solution, particularly for the long term, it doesn’t work”.

Mr White said efforts to boost STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) education had failed. “We have talked about STEM voraciously for 10 years, and yet our engagement with mathematics, science and engineering has fallen,” he said.

“Something’s wrong, and it’s not about more money because we put a lot more money in and didn’t get better results.”

Mr White, who began his career as guitarist in a rock band, then turned to repairing electric guitars and developing computer-controlled stage lighting before entering the logistics software business, said tech jobs were “very secure and extremely well paid”.

“They’re very diverse. They’ll hire anybody that has the requisite skills. And yet, only 4.7 per cent of students undertake tertiary studies in that computing area,” he said, adding reform in education needed to start when children were young.

Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research director Abigail Payne said Australia had a higher youth unemployment rate than many comparable countries, even now, when demand for labour was high.

Professor Payne said too few young Australians were going on to tertiary education and the system was too rigid, forcing school leavers to make early career choices. “Why do we keep thinking you know at 16 what you want to do in life? Why aren’t we creating greater flexibility?” she asked.

Federal opposition education spokeswoman Sarah Henderson told the conference that Australia’s school standards were a “national embarrassment”.