Australia’s fastest-growing job may surprise you

Something came out of leftfield early this decade to downgrade the café from its position of prominence in our national consciousness.

What I find fascinating is the way our culture adapts to reflect rising markets and workforces. Picture: istock

Buried within the data vaults of the Australian Bureau of Statistics lies a figure that I think encapsulates Australian values and needs. That figure documents the rise and displacement of the barista workforce. (Interestingly, the Italian word barista was never used in its current form until 1982. We are constantly inventing and/or commandeering terms to describe the minutiae of our lifestyle.) Between the 2011 and 2016 Censuses, barista ranked as the 10th fastest-growing job on the Australian continent, with an extra 15,606 positions over those five years.

And it wasn’t just the café’s barista that made our Top 10 at that time. An extra 23,105 people were employed as chefs, while kitchen hands increased by 17,188. Lifestyle loving Australians were happy to jump on board the café bandwagon during and immediately after the resources boom.

Between the 2011 and 2016 Censuses, barista ranked as the 10th fastest-growing job on the Australian continent. Picture: istock

Yet in the five years from 2016 to 2021 it was a different story. Baristas were still on the rise but this time their workforce growth was a subdued 9,020, and barista slipped to 44th in the job-growth rankings when the pandemic arrived. Part of the reason for this shift is likely to have been café closures during Covid.

Post-pandemic surveys by the ABS show the recovery of café sales and workforce numbers. Yet it is evident that something came out of leftfield early this decade to downgrade the café from its position of prominence in our national consciousness. That something, I think, is the rise of care. And specifically the rise of “aged and disabled carer” (the correct technical term), which since the 2016 Census has been Australia’s fastest growing job.

“Aged and disabled carer” is Australia’s fastest-growing job. Picture: istock

But it’s not just aged care and/or disabled care, via the NDIS; it’s also child carers and registered nurses who are on the up. Over the 60 months to last December the aged and disabled carer workforce increased by 134,000, or about 2,200 per month.

How many trained and skilled candidates do you have to interview to increase a workforce by a net 2,200 each month for 60 consecutive months? And the oldest Baby Boomer is still just 79 this year! The need for an aged care workforce will ratchet up later this decade as Baby Boomers born in the 1940s tip into their eighties. The business end of caring for this generation is about to get serious.

What I find fascinating is the way our culture adapts to reflect rising markets and workforces. Of course the term barista was always going to be commandeered from the Italian to describe the role of mostly young and fashionable coffee-makers in the 1990s. The market is therefore wide open for someone to commandeer a term from another language to describe (and to rebrand) the role of carer. This is all part of our transition from café society to care economy.

The point I am making is that Australian culture has shifted quickly and mightily from the carefree and prosperous years of early last decade to the more measured, carer-focused years of the late 2020s. There’s still a need for baristas, chefs and kitchen hands, of course – we do love our lifestyle – but the blunt fact is that, going forward, there will be a much bigger market for carers. And it really is only a matter of time before popular culture catches up, acknowledging and celebrating their role.