The skills crisis is very real. Although for most, the solutions remain imaginary.

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.

High Demand and Low Supply leaves only Four Options for the Australia Job Market

It’s nice to be the centre of attention when the news is good. Australia is leading the world in job growth. Payrolls rose by just over 46,000 last month, the most since November 2010, compared with a median estimate for an increase of 10,000 in a recent Bloomberg News survey.

Full time jobs are up 12,300 in January, and part-time employment jumped 34,000. Overall participation rates – showing the number of eligible workers in gainful employment – also rose.

This growth is being driven by demand minerals and natural resources from the world’s two fastest growing economies – India and China who between them house a third of the world’s population. Bloomberg also reports that Oil & Gas salaries are up 17% to an average of $165,000 as the various developers fight to staff the eight major LNG ventures currently under construction. 

Australia now has to face the secondary challenge – filling these jobs with relevantly skilled people. Urgent vacancies and unemployed workers do not merge seamlessly to form a perfect whole. That’s not how the job market works.

We need sources of relevant workers, mostly in the engineering and technical sector - where most of these jobs came from and where most of the empty vacancies are building up.

Logically, there are four things that can happen:

1. Australian engineering jobs can be done in Australia by local workforces
2. Work can be shipped out of Australia
3. People can be shipped into Australia
4. The work can be left undone

As the world turns its eyes to Australia’s recent job market growth, we should focus our own energies on making sure the talent we need is available so that the demand is met with supply.

There is no quick fix, but there are things we have to do to build a stronger base for the future. Demand will remain high for a long time and that means opportunity for those leaving school right now to choose careers in engineering.

We also need to focus on training so that we can keep the necessary foreign skills that come into the country here, once overseas temporary workers are gone.

Right now, it’s time to bring the right people in to capitalize on the overall opportunity the growth offers.




Trevor Burne is Managing Director of Talascend. He blogs about Australian engineering jobs, and issues affecting Australian Engineers.

Hey Recruiter, Get off my Cloud.

Recruiters using Linked-in are driving me crazy. They’re flooding their profiles, and mine, with random job spam that neither targets me personally nor attempts to add value to my life. I’m ditching recruiting contacts left, right and centre because I’m so annoyed by the outright laziness of their tactics. 

It happens in so many spheres of life. If you put a coat of fresh paint on a large wall in any major city and leave it overnight, when you return in the morning it will be covered from top to bottom in posters and fliers, hawking everything from exotic dancers to cheap gold. It’s a shoddy, opportunistic approach, with no respect for the community or the potential customers that exist within it. Just jam it up there at any old angle and people will see it. It has to be better than nothing right? Wrong.

To treat an online market place like a useful fly posting spot for your random jobs is short sighted and naïve. You may get the occasional response, you may get a few, but you’re still taking a short cut that will ultimately lead you nowhere.

The currency of the Social Media market place has always been information, not distraction marketing. You have to build your audience the same way you would at a party; you have to share information, exchange ideas and build a sustainable network. That is the road to real, long term success. 

   

This week Josh Kaplan over at Talascend’s IT division talked about the growing value of Facebook as a job seeking tool. More and more people are finding employment on Facebook. According to a recent study, 18,000,000 Americans found their current job on Facebook. This is way more than Linked-In, and yet nobody posts jobs on Facebook. Instead they build networks of contacts that yield useful information through an exchange of information. Sooner or later, it leads to work.

If Recruiters continue to spam every job that crosses their desk out across Linked-in, they will decrease its value to them as a networking tool. Your customers don’t want to see every thought as it enters your head and nor do your peers and others in your industry sector, although your competitors might find it helpful to know what you’re recruiting on.

When was the last time you checked to see how many people had dropped you as a Linked-in contact? You should. And if you find it’s a great deal more than you thought, you might want to think about it before you spam your next job.

Recruiters have a critical role to play in helping people get the jobs they deserve and move their careers forward with real direction. If they think we're in it for a cheap buck, they will desert us in droves - and we will deserve it.




Trevor Burne is Managing Director of Talascend. He blogs about Australian engineering jobs, and issues affecting Australian Engineers.