‘Crippling’ skills shortage impacts growth

DefendTex chief executive Travis Reddy knows better than anybody how Australia’s skills shortage is affecting the defence research sector.

Travis Reddy at DefendTex’s manufacturing facility.

DefendTex chief executive Travis Reddy knows better than anybody how Australia’s skills shortage is affecting the defence research sector.

“It’s reaching the point where it’s crippling,” he says. “It can take more than six months to fill a position at this point. It could take even longer. And in the quality of staff that you get, you’re often making compromises where you previously wouldn’t have had to do so.”

Australian-owned DefendTex is a defence research and development company aiming to develop new solutions for the Australian Defence Force and its allies. Its research areas span anything from defence systems such as body armour all the way through to missiles and countermeasures.

The company works heavily with the university sector, employing 139 researchers at 30 universities across Australia. There are two facets to its work – the research and development and then the application of those technologies to deliver capabilities for the Australian Defence Force.

Within DefendTex itself, the company draws on engineers from all disciplines, but particularly mechanical, electrical, chemical, mechatronics and aerospace. “They’re probably the five major ones that we need to get access to and are having difficulty to source,” Reddy says.

The problem is the result of the huge number of defence projects currently underway in Australia, universities not producing enough candidates to fill those roles, and not enough people who want to work in defence.

Additionally, universities are mostly turning out generic engineers rather than the specialists – such as in ballistic protection or guided missile design – who are needed for defence research.

“You take naval shipbuilding as an example. There’s a very large body of work that needs to be undertaken in Australia and that’s consuming a large number of the qualified resources to work on naval shipbuilding,” Reddy says.

“At the same time, there’s some very large army vehicle projects that will be running. There’s the artillery project that’s running.

“There are a significant number of large capital projects running concurrently and which means we are all competing for the same finite resource.”

For Reddy, there isn’t much solution to the problem except to ask existing staff to do more and work longer hours, but that in turn leads to staff retention problems if it goes on for too long.

“It means that we’ve not taken up some new projects we otherwise would have done, so it’s certainly hurting growth and it’s certainly hurting our ability to supply capability in the ADF,” Reddy says.

Rob Kremer, a director of specialist defence, engineering and ICT recruiter Kinexus, says the government’s huge increase in defence spending over the next decade is providing Australian businesses a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but they need more skilled researchers and workers.

The skills problem starts with the falling number of students taking up the STEM subjects of science, technology, engineering and maths at school, which then leads to lower take up at university.

Defence technology is also at another disadvantage compared with other industries in that many roles require researchers to have security clearance, which makes non-Australian citizens ineligible, Kremer says. The problem is particularly acute in Sydney and Melbourne where a large number of software engineers are foreign born, but less so in Adelaide and Brisbane.

The Covid-19 border closures have added to the difficulties.

The dearth of STEM-qualified foreign workers coming into Australia has exacerbated staff shortages in industries including finance and transport and intensified competition with the defence research sector for staff.

Australia’s huge infrastructure pipeline of around a quarter of a trillion dollars is also adding to the staff shortage.

Additionally, says Kremer, there are cultural differences between defence sector employers and other sectors. It can be hard for some staff to adjust to the slower work processes in defence compared with a purely commercial environment such as a resources company.

In the short-term, recruiting staff from adjacent sectors – rail and defence have a lot in common, for instance – will alleviate the problem but, longer term, more STEM training in schools and then universities and other tertiary institutions will be needed, he says.

The training organisation WithYouWithMe tests and trains workers, particularly veterans, in digital skills for defence and private sector roles.

Chief technology officer Scarlett McDermott says there is a lack of digital skills across the defence sector.

“We’ll see that start to really hurt as we try to scale up both uniformed personnel and all of the programs that accompany that, but particularly cyber, data, software, automation and more specific skill sets around particular technologies, so things like drones or submarines,” she says.

“Those will take a long time to build up.”

Like Kremer, McDermott says there are cultural differences which mean that someone who has a non-defence role before they join a defence organisation lacks the business context for defence, even if they have the right skills.

“One real benefit of recruiting veterans into defence technology is that they’ve actually got that lay of the land. They understand the security processes that go around everything and they understand things like a rank structure or the actual context of use of the systems they’re creating,” she says.

In March the government launched a campaign to highlight the job opportunities in the defence industry.

The campaign highlights that the skills Australians have displayed for generations building “stuff” in their back yards are now in great demand to fill the jobs in the growing defence industries.

“We want Australians to understand that there are and will continue to be incredible opportunities for skilled people within our defence industries and that will continue for many years to come,” Defence Industry Minister Melissa Price said when she launched the campaign.

Nationwide investments in naval shipbuilding alone will create 15,000 jobs across the country by the end of the decade, she said.

For Travis Reddy, the problem is so serious that DefendTex is considering establishing its own training organisation to run accredited training.

“We’re working to try to get accredited courseware over here that can deliver with experienced engineers and then have that course accredited by existing Australian universities so that we can have an outreach program where we can bring engineers in, give them the skills that we need so the industry can better benefit and get greater market response,” he says.