Parties war on skills crisis as business suffers
With many Australian companies now finding a lack of skilled staff holding back their business, Labor has accused the Coalition of doing little to tackle the skills crisis.
A report released this week by National Australia Bank has revealed that 65 percent of firms say difficulty finding staff is limiting their growth, with 27 percent rating it as a major constraint.
The Labor Shadow Minister for Education and Training's Office told ZDNet Australia that the Howard government has neglected the importance of skills, education and training "over 11 long years", to the point that "Australia now faces a shortage of 200,000 skilled workers over the next five years".
The government recently announced as part of its election manifesto that it will spend AU$2.1 billion over 10 years on 100 new technical colleges.
The Shadow Minister's Office, however, said that the planned technical colleges are not an adequate answer to the skills problem, as the colleges that have already been introduced are "under-enrolled, are still yet to produce one graduate, and outsource the bulk of their training".
Even if the 50 planned technical colleges are up and running in three years, they will only produce around 15,000 to 20,000 graduates, according to Labor.
Labor's own AU$2.5 billion plan to tackle the shortage will see new trade centres built in Australia's 2,650 secondary schools, and is expected to reach one million students from Years 9 to 12, the party said.
However, Simon Lynch, director of IT at recruiting company Michael Page International, said that even if education receives the necessary funding, Australians will not see the benefits of it for three to five years, when the students involved finish their studies. Until then, Lynch says, an alternative of skilled immigration can help ease the problem.
Lynch added companies are also now taking up the option of training people outside their normal field of expertise.
"As the skills crisis bites a little bit more, people are having to be more flexible in what they look at," he said, adding if all companies were to follow this trend, the crisis could be eased.
The Office for the Minister for Education and Training, Julie Bishop, did not respond to requests for comment.