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New workforce strategy targets participation
Retrieved from http://www.campusreview.com.au/p ... amp;idArticle=14993 dated on 16 March 2010, 14:54 pm Australian Time.
New workforce strategy targets participation - and targets 15 Mar 10 by John Ross | Print this story | Send this story to a friend
Skills Australia has jumped on the targets bandwagon with its new workforce development strategy. Targets to increase qualification numbers are all very well, but we also need a target to ensure they’re used more effectively, according to Skills Australia. The workforce advisory body has called on COAG to adopt yet another target – to raise the country’s aggregate workforce participation rate by 4 percentage points to 69 per cent by 2025.
The new target is one of 12 recommendations Skills Australia has offered in its national workforce development strategy, ‘Australian Workforce Futures’, which it released early this month. It said without a significant increase in workforce participation over the next 15 years, Australia risked missing out on the “dividends” from its investment in education.
Chair Philip Bullock said the target was ambitious but achievable because workforce participation rates were low, by OECD standards, for most working-age Australians. He told a higher education conference in Sydney last week that Australia was the tenth worst of the 30 OECD countries in participation by 25-64 year old men and 25-34 year old women. Participation is also relatively low among 55-64 year olds of both genders, Bullock said. “The modelling says if we can lift participation in those sectors, on top of our indigenous and low-SES focus, we’ll get more people into the workforce, more skills, better social inclusion, better outcomes for individuals, and better outcomes for the economy overall – particularly in the context of the ageing population.”
The report says the workforce participation target, if achieved, will halve the expected increase in older Australians’ dependency on the workforce. Current projections – based on the 2010 intergenerational report – are that the number of workers for each dependent older person will slide from 4.11 now to 3.04 in 2025. But Bullock said that as well as getting a higher proportion of Australians into the workforce, there was a critical need for employers to make better use of the skills of the people who were already part of it. He said that while Skills Australia’s consultations had heard plenty of industry complaints about skill shortages, 30 per cent of employees still said their skills weren’t being utilised properly. Nevertheless, the report says, more skills are needed. It says a new target will need to be met before Australia can even contemplate meeting the existing COAG target of halving the proportion of 20-64 year olds without certificate III level qualifications. “Skills Australia’s modelling projects that under the highest future growth scenario, the economic demand for qualifications will require that 62 per cent of employed people hold qualifications at certificate III or above by 2015, rising to almost 70 per cent in 2025,” it says. “Even at these higher levels we may not reach the COAG target.”
Consequently, the report says, yet another target is needed – increasing Australia’s education and training effort by three per cent every year until 2025. The report says this will be cost-free – for the next few years, at any rate – because increased funding is already in the system in the form of the Productivity Places Program and the post-Bradley capacity for universities to over-enrol. Extra infrastructure funding and proposed improvements to student assistance will also help, it says. But after 2012, the report says, the cost of the increased education and training effort will accumulate by around $660 million a year. This would see total tertiary education expenditure from all sources rising by $10 billion to $32 billion, in 2008 dollars. But the short term challenge is to increase demand for tertiary education, Bullock said, “because it looks like we might not be too badly off on the supply side”.
Another key recommendation – and one that can also be achieved with existing DEEWR resources, the report says – is for the Australian Government to develop and implement a national adult language, literacy and numeracy strategy. But the report also advocates a 50 per cent increase in funding for several existing literacy and numeracy programs at a cost of an extra $50 million a year. “When we talked to people, they said the real barrier was numeracy and literacy. If you can’t fix that, people don’t get into the workforce, they can’t up-skill and they get lost,” Bullock said. “We’re saying we’ve got to step up and get COAG, the states and the federal government to agree that we need a national numeracy and literacy strategy. A strategy which has targets, funding and the capacity to lift the good work that’s already being done in many areas. “It’s underfunded. Good work, good intentions, but underfunded.” As anticipated, the strategy also recommends a more targeted approach to skills planning. Bullock said this approach had emanated from a view that centralised planners shouldn’t “pick winners”.
“The market generally takes care of 80 per cent of issues, so you don’t need to plan for everything. Forecasting for every occupation simply does not work. “But there is a subset of occupations for which forecasting can and should be done – those occupations which take a long time to train for, and for which there’s a good fit between the training and the occupation.” The report identifies 92 such occupations in its “specialised occupations list”. They include managerial, engineering, financial, legal and education professions along with fire and emergency workers, police, 22 health and medical specialities and 23 trades. The new skilled occupation list, which will determine priority occupations for skilled migration, will be a smaller version of this list. Skills Australia plans to release the smaller list next month. Education Minister Julia Gillard said she would respond to the recommendations “in due course”. But she said the report highlighted a “skills mismatch” arising from youth unemployment and the ageing population on the one hand, and growing demand for more highly skilled professionals – particularly in health, education and construction – on the other.
“There are specific skills shortages with the potential to worsen due to demographic shifts and lower participation rates, but at the same time we have unacceptably high youth unemployment. The price of inaction is demand for skills continuing to outstrip supply, an over-reliance on imported skilled labour and enduring localised unemployment. “All of these issues demand improvements in Australia’s vocational education and training sector.” Group Training Australia said the report was a “valuable blueprint”, and particularly welcomed the call to boost VET funding. “The focus on literacy and numeracy is very welcome and critical to building more sustainable pathways in apprenticeships and VET more generally,” added CEO Jim Barron.
TAFE Directors Australia welcomed the emphasis on developing the tertiary education workforce, as well as funding. “The acknowledgement that public funding per student contact hour to TAFE institutes has been falling in recent years may now give impetus to this situation being redressed by both state and Commonwealth governments,” said acting CEO Pam Caven. The Australian Council for Private Education and Training said the strategy would form the basis of a ‘VET roadmap’. “ACPET will be active in ensuring that the critical role of the private sector is acknowledged and that the unemployed, existing workers and employers are able to make a real choice of training provider that best suits their needs,” said CEO Andrew Smith. The Enterprise RTO Association (ERTOA) also welcomed the report, particularly a recommendation that governments use public funding to “leverage” workforce development at industry and enterprise level. |
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发表于 16-3-2010 15:22:46
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