The sector is the seventh-largest employer, with about 861,000 people in jobs. There are now more software engineers and developers than solicitors, plumbers or hairdressers. One in 16 working Australians works in tech, and the number of tech jobs has grown 66 percent since 2005, almost double the average growth rate across the Australian economy.
Vacancy rates in tech are 60 percent higher than the national average and tech jobs are forecast to increase at triple the rate.
Shortfall looms
Despite the strong demand, Accenture models suggest the sector will lose 350,000 people due to retirement and shifts into other sectors over the next eight years. This means about 653,000 people must be trained to meet the needs of the digital sector.
If nothing further is done, Accenture found there would be a shortfall of 186,000 trained people by 2030.
There are three broad sources of trained tech people – universities, vocational training and skilled migrants – and the employment forecast revealed significant issues in improving the pipeline of trainees and retaining talent in the sector.
The first and most startling barrier is the lack of awareness of tech jobs. You can’t be what you can’t see, and a survey by Year 13 Academy and the Digital Skills Organization revealed that half of students say they have never been taught about digital careers.
While many of the jobs are relatively new, the reality is that more than three decades since the internet was “invented”, high schools are struggling to incubate and skill up enough students to generate a sufficient pipeline for the university and vocational education system to develop .
Worse is the chronic gender bias within the sector. Only 10 percent of tertiary tech students, and just a quarter of those working in the industry, are women. The Year 13 study found that only a third of women consider tech jobs, compared with two-thirds of men. Simply getting these numbers into balance would significantly expand the local tech workforce.
The report also revealed big leaks of talent from the training system.
About two-thirds of the annual 12,000 university tech graduates either leave Australia to return to their native country or move into other sectors such as professional services and finance. This adds up to an undersupply of 4600 Information Communication Technology (ICT) graduates a year, or a 53 percent shortfall to meet demand. Many international students must leave because of visa requirements, which suggests there is an easy win for policymakers.
While university-level ICT enrollments are rising, VET tech course completions have fallen over the last period. Surprisingly, VET students in IT-related courses reported poor employment outcomes, with only half getting a better job once they had completed their studies.
The poor supply-side response from the VET sector is a patent failure and points to Australia’s chronic inability to develop non-graduate, digital-ready talent.
Contributing to the problem is the failure to adapt course curricula to industry needs. There are no accredited courses for product managers, user experience designers and business analysts, the Tech Council report noted. All these roles have been well established in the digital sector for more than a decade.
The sector itself is not blameless. Entry pathways for graduate-level employees are opaque at best, and the sector’s many smaller firms and start-ups do not have the capacity to deliver talent development and graduate programs.
A third of tech graduates end up in non-tech business roles, another indicator that the sector itself has plenty to do to address its chronic shortages.
Tech workers have enjoyed a 22 percent increase in pay in the past two years, but this has not prompted any dramatic shift in the number of non-tech workers wanting to retrain. The Tech Council report found only 7 percent of non-tech workers have a strong skill match with in-demand roles, meaning the sector is heavily dependent on the graduate and VET pipeline.
At a public policy level, there is much deeper work needed to understand why efforts to remedy the shortages have struggled to be effective. There are 93 different programs under way by government, industry or education providers, about half focused on retraining and half on new trainees, the report notes.
A good start would be bringing a national coherence and focus on what programs work best, and new federal Industry Minister Ed Husic said all the right things when he launched the report.
Husic has made it clear he wants a unified industry position and has called a meeting to get the three big industry groups and lobbyists – the Australian Computer Society, the Australian Information Industry Association and the Tech Council – on the same page before the job summit next month.
Industry advocates are in screaming agreement about the problem but, having played more in the Canberra shadows than in the front line, the sector needs to get its political act together.
This includes the big platform players, who instinctively prefer to work in the background and are represented by a little-known lobby group called Digi.