More needs to be
done to meet the demand for highly-skilled workers and to prevent increases in
youth unemployment, according to a statement released today by the Government's
workforce and productivity agency.
Terrific. That’s
that sorted then. Who’s for a beer?
This year-long
study, which may just as well be subtitled ‘how I learned to stop worrying and
state the obvious’ is only addressing a small proportion of the overall
problem.
It’s all well
and good to talk about the need for training, it is true that only proper
teaching and apprenticeship programs can develop the skilled labor we need. But
our real problems lie the other side of the line where training becomes education,
where training involves spending years at university getting an engineering
degree and then building a few years experience on projects. These are the
people we need, and you can no more train people to achieve this status than
you can train someone to be a doctor. Both things take a comparable amount of
time.
There’s a lot of rubbish talked by analysts who point to the
fact that we have 350,000 engineers and 325,000 engineering jobs, but this is
entirely the wrong measure of the situation.
The relevant figures are all related to slow growth. On average Australia produces 9,500 engineers
each year and loses 4,500 to retirement, creating an average net increase of
about 5,000.
That doesn’t sound so bad, until you consider that over the
last decade, the additional demand for Australian engineers averages 13,000 each year and
has reached over 20,000 on occasions. The
result is a major deficit that threatens the completion of key projects. It is
these projects that have proofed Australia from the worst of the global recession.
Our LNG infrastructure must continue to develop to capitalize on the business
available from emergent markets. This means engineers, lots of them and a
sensible plan for getting them in place.
We must develop a long-term, sustainable strategy, including
intake and education. We must also banish our reluctance to hire expertise in
from the rest of the world.
We have little to lose now in the long run from filling the
critical Australian engineering jobs from the UK, USA or even the Philippines. We have a great deal to lose if our
national project portfolio continues to buckle under the weight of our current problems.
Trevor Burne is Managing Director of Talascend. He blogs about Australian engineering jobs, and issues affecting Australian Engineers.
