Industry needs to be part of the solution in dealing with tech sector labour shortages, business and thought leaders say.
Improving the pathway for women to access tech jobs is a vital step, they added.
Panelists Kate Pounder, CEO — Tech Council of Australia; Patrick Kidd, CEO — Digital Skills Organisation and Helen Lea, Chief Employee Experience Officer — MYOB; joined Megan Lilly, Executive Director of the Ai Group Centre for Education and Training (Ai Group ATC), at last week’s webinar, The Digital Skills Opportunity.
“Digital transformation is happening right now in the boardrooms and elsewhere across the country,” Ms Lilly said.
“There are big opportunities as well as big challenges and many unknowns.”
The Tech Council estimates there will be 1million tech jobs in Australia by 2025.
“Tech jobs now account for about 860,000 positions in Australia, making it the 7th-highest employing sector,” the council’s CEO Kate Pounder said.
“Those tech jobs are growing incredibly fast — at a rate of 66% since 2005. The average growth rate for jobs across the economy has been 35%. That is why it is a great opportunity — it is creating these wonderful high-paying, secure and flexible jobs that are helping many industries to digitise.
“But filling these jobs is incredibly hard. These jobs, as well as STEM jobs, have some of the highest vacancy rates; their job ads are staying open the longest.”
The forecast of 1million tech jobs by 2025 suggests 280,000 people will enter the sector over the next four years, allowing for retirement. About 140,000 of these jobs are expected to come from people reskilling or transitioning from other industries with the other half expected to come equally from the training system and from migration.
But skilled migration has its challenges.
“We don’t have the right mix of people training for tech jobs,” Ms Pounder said.
“If we look at ICT degrees in Australia, we are training a lot of people relative to the population but two-thirds of the people we are training are international students.
“No other country has that mix. Because of the rules around the visas for international students, half of those students leave Australia within two years of completing their degree.
“So, on one hand, we’ve got big opportunities but on the other, not enough Australians are being trained to fill vacancies. We’re not thinking in a long-term and productive way about how we are training future generations of Australians to take on these roles.”
Patrick Kidd, Chief Executive Officer of the Digital Skills Organisation, wants to close this gap.
“The challenge is that employers need access to people with the right skills more quickly than now,” says Mr Kidd.
“Every single job, every single industry and every single employer needs to have digital skills to enable them to be successful in what they do.
“However, we are not generating enough people from our education system and we’re not doing it quickly enough. If you go to university, it’s taking you between one and eight years to complete that qualification. We need to be generating people into the workplace in a matter of months, not years.
“Meanwhile, the VET sector is not carrying its load. It’s a massive sector; there are 4000 RTOs but of those, fewer than 25% are delivering any type of ICT training.”
Mr Kidd has called for a single digital literacy standard in the workforce.
“Digital skills in the workplace are as important as the ability to read and write,” he added.
“Until we recognise that, we’re not going to be able to shift the dial. There’s a real need to be clear about what it is we need to do.
“We need a standard that schools, universities and the VET sector all understand and then we need to help employers to take it seriously and get interested in this subject.
“We need to articulate what the needs are in simple language so employees can engage with it. The big companies will always do this, and they will do it well. However, the SMEs need help to implement practical measures to move forward.”
A lifelong learning approach is essential, Mr Kidd said.
“Digital capability and technology move and shift all the time. It’s about learning and keeping on learning. A lot of this is cultural and it is leadership. Our employers as well as our workforce have to recognise its importance and drive it accordingly.
“There is a great opportunity for us, but unless we come together and collaborate and talk the same language, we’ll continue to have the same conversation over the next five years.”
One in five Australian SMEs – almost half a million — have no or low levels of digital adoption, says MYOB’s Helen Lea.
“They’re absolutely struggling to keep up,” she says.
“This places them on the backfoot for pandemic recovery and at greater security risk and the further they slip behind, the harder it is to catch up.”
Time, cost, confidence and capability are drivers of this divide, with 37% of SMEs lacking an online presence. A vicious cycle perpetuates as tech solutions continue to evolve and progress and become less accessible to the unskilled.
“We see digital fluency and the confidence and capability to use digital tools in everyday business processes as a critical enabler of business success and as we move through the pandemic, for survival,” Ms Lea said.
The value of improved digital uptake across the SME economy is significant.
“Our modelling shows that for every dollar spent, there is a $23 return,” Ms Lea says.
Industry has to be part of the solution in improving the pipeline of women entering the tech sector, she adds.
Only about 10% of students who undertake the qualifications into tech roles are female. Women are more likely to enter a tech job between the ages of 25 to 30.
MYOB, a business management platform for SMEs, is celebrating the sixth year of its reskilling initiative, DevelopHer.
The paid traineeship, which offers coaching and mentoring, is targeted at mid-career changes for women wanting to move into technology.
“We need more programs like this to collectively boost the pipeline of women entering the profession because if we don’t do it, who's going to?” Ms Lea said.
“We have to be part of the solution rather than simply bemoaning the state of the pipeline and the suggestion that it is someone else’s problem to fix.”
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Wendy Larter is Communications Manager at the Australian Industry Group. She has more than 20 years’ experience as a reporter, features writer, contributor and sub-editor for newspapers and magazines including The Courier-Mail in Brisbane and Metro, the News of the World, The Times and Elle in the UK.
