New report reveals opportunity to help grow Australia’s digital workforce

The Digital Skills Organisation has recently published its final report, Growing Australia's digital workforce, which defines Australia’s current and future digital skill needs. The report reveals that Australia is projected to need 370,000 digital workers by 2026. It finds that openings for work involving high-level digital skills – such as programmers and analysts – are expected to balloon by 47 percent in the five years to 2026 (over 420,000 additional digital expert workers).

The increase in demand for digital workers shows no signs of slowing, with relevant skills and experience desperately needed across Australia’s finance, technology and business sectors. Key Insights from the report include:

• Every person in the workforce now needs to have digital skills.
• A consistent approach to describing the digital skills needed across the economy is required. The report proposes describing the digital workforce as either digital expert workers (require specific skills as central functional skills, 7% of the workforce), digitally enabled workers (rely on digital skills to augment their functional skills, 43% of the workforce), or digitally informed workers (requiring digital literacy but not specific digital skills, remainder of the workforce).
• The training system must be able to cope with the rapid pace of change in the digital skills needed by job roles.
• More teachers and trainers are required who can deliver digital training across different qualifications.

The report also highlights that one in two VET graduates, or 50 percent, report that the skills they learnt are not relevant to their current job.

The insights from the report will be transferred to, and expanded upon, as the Digital Skills Organisation becomes the new Jobs and Skills Council (JSC),  the Future Skills Organisation. The Future Skills Organisation has been tasked by the Australian Government, in consultation with the states and territories, with addressing Australia’s digital skills shortages and with future-proofing skills and training critical to advancing Australia’s economy and in particular the finance, technology, and business sectors.

Through close collaboration with industry, unions, training providers and the government, the Future Skills Organisation will work collectively to benefit both employees and employers. Ai Group is represented on the Board of the Future Skills Organisation.

Download a copy of the Growing Australia’s Digital Workforce report.