On Thursday 19th I attended the NSW Community Services and Health – ITAB Forum. The key speaker at the event was Phillip Bullock who is the chair of SKILLS Australia and who talked about the future of our National Training System. This is a summary of some ideas presented at the Forum:
· SKILLS Australia was formed to deal with a changing economy and society
· Government policy needs to respond to the following questions: what kind of industries will emerge in the future? What kind of skills and capacities will we be required to develop? Do we have the capacity to respond to these challenges?
· There are clear drivers and trends that will shape the future of industries and skills. The economy will depend on Asian markets and demands, climate change will be the central theme, there will be more integrated technologies and Australian society will be demographically more diverse and with an ageing groups
· Skills Australia will be focused on workforce development issues.
· Workforce development is built on three elements: participation, up-skilling and skills utilization
In order to answer these three questions: Where are we headed?, Where do we want to be? And How do we get there?
Skills Australia conducted three activities:
· 1. identifying major workforce and education trends for the next few decades. This was done by analysing historical data.
· 2. three scenarios were developed as a future planning tool for an uncertain environment. An open and closed economy were the first two scenarios and the current status quo was the third. Policy directions and responses were developed according to each scenario.
· 3. Access Economics conducted a number of models and projections based on economic data.
SKILLS Australia received the following feedback from their consultations
· There is clear support for a national approach to workforce development, but not to centralised control
· Encourage holistic, multi-faceted action (eg training, stimulus, tax incentives)
· Greater role of Government is needed
· Improve numeracy, literacy and generic core skills
· Support of new jobs and new industries
· Future role of immigration in addressing skill shortages
· Ongoing targeted focus on participation
Some areas of future changes affecting the training system
· Tighten AQTF 2007 framework
· Purchasing contracts to drive day-to-day quality
· Use information to improve accountability, performance and choice
· Establish a national regulator
MF
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