Businesses have called on governments to invest more in skills training even as they cut such spending themselves, with Australia relying on skilled migrants to keep from falling behind rival nations, academics and unions say.
The review, made public ahead of a jobs and skills summit in Canberra, comes as Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers on Monday unveiled a bill to provide $1.5 billion in tax incentives for small businesses to upskill workers.
The proportion of workers receiving on-the-job training in 2005 has fallen to about 20 per cent today, says John Buchanan, executive director of the University of Sydney’s Intellectual Resources Initiative.
“While businesses are clamoring for skills shortages, they themselves have been contributing to the drought,” he said. “Outside the military and the health system, employers’ planning around skills and training is unfortunate.”
Buchanan said at the peak of mining, the resource sector was asking $200m for training, “they were making more money than God”.
Industrial relations issues dominated the summit on Thursday and Friday. But attention may shift to the skills side of the deal as ministers outline policies to boost workers’ capacity and improve their chances of at least a pay rise in line with inflation.
Chalmers, along with ministers Julie Collins and Stephen Jones, unveiled two tax incentives for public consultation that were not approved in the previous government’s March budget.
Ministers said more than $1.5 billion worth of investment in technology development and skills and training upgrades would return to 29 March 2022.
Small businesses with an annual turnover of less than $50m will receive a bonus 20% rebate on eligible expenditure on overseas training of staff by Australian-registered providers until 30 June 2024. You can also apply for a 20% discount that supports the adoption of digital technologies. Until the end of next June.
Monash University professor Gerald Burke outlined long-term trends in vocational education and training in a paper earlier this year, saying state-owned companies such as Rail or Telstra were once big in-house trainers.
But privatization has led to an increasingly lucrative search for suppliers, sometimes resulting in “horrendous spending.”
Burke said one result was the Australian Skills Quality Authority (ASCA), which claims to offer up to 4,000 registered vocational coaches and 170 higher education providers, is struggling to keep up.
“It’s a huge problem,” Aska said, “he has to spend a lot of time signing up new people and signing up people who don’t meet the criteria.”
Apprenticeships in construction, such as electricians, tended to decline even though mostly male graduates could earn good wages. In contrast, training in other professions, such as care services, was predominantly female, often under-resourced, say Burke and Buchanan.
Jim Stanford, head of the Center for Future Work, said in a recent report to the ACTU that apprenticeships and other vocational training in relation to the workforce were at a lower level under the Coalition Government, which reduced spending on Tafe and other programmes.
“Business investment in innovation and R&D has slipped since the coalition came to power,” Stanford said, citing national accounts data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Alison Barnes, president of the National Higher Education Union, said that only a third of the state’s 250,000 workers have ongoing, secure employment, reducing its ability to attract and retain tomorrow’s trainers.
“These are shocking statistics … Negligence is a long-term trend and it’s certainly on the rise,” Barnes said. “This is undermining Australia’s long-term ability to respond to the challenges the country will face in the coming years.”
Funding sources for vocational education and training in Australia. (Except for international students, public and private costs are the same.) (Source: Gerard Burke) pic.twitter.com/equ0gOmdev
— Peter Hannam (@p_hannam) August 29, 2022
On Sunday, Ai Group, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Australian Chamber of Commerce joined the ACTU in releasing a statement in support of “common interests in skills and training”.
Among the recommendations are the establishment of Jobs and Skills Australia, an agency responsible for producing advice on “economy-wide workforce needs”, and investment in vocational education and training to “ensure that a genuine and sustainable funding system meets labor market needs”. It also increases accountability.
Monash’s Burke said the data itself was not well reported, so it was “presumptive” to know how much the private sector spends on training.
