Skills shortages are a challenge confronting the Australian economy.
This extends beyond the shortfall of available employees to also having necessary industry skills in the immediate term and having a pathway to develop skills required to service and support emerging technologies in our industry.
Three aspects of this are:
- Skills Summit
- Skills Reform
- CMEIG Initiatives
Skills Summit
The Albanese Labor Government’s Jobs and Skills Summit will be held at Parliament House in Canberra on 1–2 September.
The Summit will bring together stakeholders with the goal of a better-trained, more productive workforce and will inform the Employment White Paper, along with submissions from industry and the wider community, which will help to shape the future of Australia’s labour market.
The Summit will cover a range of topics with a focus on:
- Keeping unemployment low, boosting productivity and raising incomes
- Addressing skills shortages and getting our skills mix right over the long-term
- Delivering secure, well-paid jobs and strong, sustainable wages growth
- Expanding employment opportunities for all Australians including the most disadvantaged
- Improving migration settings to support higher productivity and wages
- Maximising jobs and opportunities from renewable energy, tackling climate change, the digital economy, the care economy and a Future Made in Australia
- Ensuring women have equal opportunities and equal pay.
We encourage members to participate in that process and will provide further details as they become available.
For more information, visit Jobs and Skills Summit.
Skills Reform
Separately there is presently a review underway seeking to improve the delivery of Vocational & Education (VET) training with objectives to:
- strengthen the role of industry and employers in the VET system
- improve VET qualifications
- support high-quality training delivery
- improve VET for secondary students
- improve foundation skills
A new Industry Clusters model—as groups of aligned industries—will replace the 67 Industry Reference Committees and six Skills Service Organisations and are expected to be fully operational by 1 January 2023 with the intent of ensuring courses and qualifications in the sector are driven by and better meet the needs of industry, as well as students.
Details of the proposed Industry Clusters are here.
The proposed structure of the VET sector is as below:
Figure 1: Structure of National VET sector
For further details refer: Skills Reform
CMEIG Initiatives
The simple capacity to capture, prioritise and resource skills training package development is critical to having a skilled workforce aligned to industry’s requirements.
To this end, CMEIG has two initiatives underway:
- New technologies consistent with a low emission economy means that the apprentice of the future will look different from the apprentice of today.
Matt Tosolini (Komatsu) and Paul Howard (Hitachi) are leading the writing of a Paper that identifies current and future training developments so that the urgent training gaps that exist now are identified and addressed, and priority is afforded to developing training packages to skill apprentices to support and service the alternate technologies that are already being commercialized.
Regardless of the outcomes of the Skills Summit and Skills Reform it is critical that access to technical writing / training package development resources are directly available to industry.
It is CMEIG’s view that the loss of this industry led approach since Auto Skills Australia is a key contributor to the widening skills gaps being experienced in our sector.
- Earthmoving machines (eg excavators, backhoes & loaders) use for lifting freely suspended loads to align with engineering and standards developments.
CMEIG, as a focused initiative, is drafting a unit of competency to ensure earth moving machinery’s safe lifting of freely suspended loads, that are incidental to the machine’s primary purpose, as part of the apprentice training qualification.
Further updates will be provided as available.