Education and Skills
Australia needs to continually update the skills of its workforce to maintain its sovereign capability and ensure it remains ahead of changing market opportunities rather than falling behind.
This will enable Australia to compete for skilled technical workers in a global market, ensure today’s STEM graduates play a role in tomorrow’s challenges and respond to future crises like COVID-19.
Australia is facing a skills shortage in many areas which are critical for growth. In the chemistry industry, we are experiencing skills shortages across the sector – from forklift drivers to technologists and engineers.
Importantly, Australia must act to address the immediate and future shortage of engineers if we are to take advantage of the opportunities to transform and grow our economy.
In the OECD, Australia ranks third lowest in terms of engineering graduates.2 We must strengthen our sovereign capacity to build a sustainable engineering workforce, which in turn will provide substantial opportunities for Australian industry.3
The Job Ready Graduates package, introduced in 2021, has made it financially more difficult for universities to offer engineering places. It has also decoupled engineering education from research activity. Given the critical role that engineers play in driving innovation in our economy, this is a suboptimal outcome.
Immediate
- Action to address the chronic undersupply of qualified engineers throughout Australia, including:
– a reversal of the changes to higher education funding that reduced funding for domestic engineering students; and
– the development of a joint and aligned industry/ university skills plan. - To increase the pipeline of engineering students, a national campaign to promote Australia’s vision for our future industries and career opportunities.
Medium-term
- Support for programs that rebuild strategic skills and capabilities;
- Greater investment in STEM literacy education for all Australian school students;
- Continued government support for industry collaboration with universities and the CSIRO;
- Investment in tertiary programs to provide education to address the gap in regulatory science capability in Australia and around the world;
- Investment in vocational training that builds the skills needed to address the changing nature of work and which builds a suitable level of “reserve-like” skills and expertise that can be readily deployed to support Australia’s capacity to deal with future crises.
