Skill Shortages

The Hon. J.S. LEE (15:03): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Minister for Employment, Higher Education and Skills a question about skill shortages.

Leave granted.

The Hon. J.S. LEE: SA Power Networks undertook a skills shortages project to identify the occupations where it experiences shortages and recruitment difficulties. A report collated around July 2015 stated that SA Power Networks experienced shortages and difficulties in recruiting in a number of professions, which included specialised engineers, technical officers, diesel mechanics and trade skilled workers.

The report confirmed that South Australia has a limited resource pool for many of those occupations and skills, making recruitment for such positions a considerable challenge. The report also identified that South Australia has a small population, low population growth and a net deficit in state migration, and they confirmed that 'skilled workers are far more likely to leave South Australia to work in other mainland states than they are to come to South Australia from those states'. My questions to the minister are:

1. How will the minister address the skills shortages such as specialised engineers and those specified and identified in the SA Power Network report?

2. What measures has the government put in place to stop the drift of skilled people moving into other states?

3. What overall impact will the migration drift to interstate have on the population strategy by the government for South Australia?

The Hon. G.E. GAGO (Minister for Employment, Higher Education and Skills, Minister for Science and Information Economy, Minister for the Status of Women, Minister for Business Services and Consumers) (15:05): I thank the honourable member for her most important question. She has asked similar questions around these sorts of matters in the past, so I am already on the record outlining the way we go about managing this. It is mainly through our TASC committee, our Training and Skills Commission, who have a number of responsibilities, but one of which is to assist in helping the government understand labour force needs and helping us to be able to forecast ahead to ensure that we are putting our training efforts into those areas that are going to be in need to ensure that we have a well trained skilled labour force able to meet contemporary industry needs. We know industry needs change over time. So TASC do that; they have a 5-year plan and they basically update that almost every year.

The DSD also provides industry surveying. That has not resulted in particularly high quality data but, nevertheless, it is still data that we are able to use. It is basically a survey that goes out to businesses and asks them to outline the sorts of labour force that they currently have, what their current skill needs are and what their anticipated needs may be.

With the last survey that we did, we did a pilot, and we tried something a bit different to try to generate better quality results than what we had been achieving in the past. So we did a pilot in a particular region and, unfortunately, the response rate to that was still fairly low, but it was better than it was previously. I think the reason is that businesses see another survey and it takes some time to fill out and it requires businesses to think about where they are going in the future and what their needs might be.

As we know, the bulk of South Australia's, and for that matter Australia's, businesses are small to medium-sized businesses and many of them simply survive month-by-month in trading in whatever their particular business is. They often do not have a lot of infrastructure within their organisation to enable them to have the staff to be able to sit around and do business forecasting and such like, strategic planning and such like, so they often just do not have the wherewithal, resources and time to do that. I do understand why it is difficult for businesses to share their data with us, but basically we can only plan on labour force needs based on the quality of the information that we have, and so the poorer the quality, the poorer the indices we have in predicting where our needs are going to be.

That being said, nevertheless, I think we still do a reasonable job given the data that we do have. We continue to look at ways to try to improve that and we continue discussion with the federal government as well in terms of how they might be able to assist in understanding nationally business needs.

Finally, there is a subsidised component under WorkReady called Jobs First employment programs. That means that, even if a business had not been particularly successful in being able to compete for training off the subsidised training list, if they were able to demonstrate that there were specific jobs that successful trainees could go into and they partnered with an RTO, they could apply for that Jobs First employment program funding.

They are able to design whatever training they like, whether it be accredited or non-accredited or a combination of both. The main criterion is that a commitment is given to those people who successfully complete that training that they will go into a job. With respect to some of the specific examples the Hon. Jing Lee gave, I would say they would lend themselves very well to a Jobs First employment program approach.