VET News

Australia's Skills - Now and Into the Future

A fundamental innovation in the NSC’s work is the focus on skills, alongside the more traditional analysis  of the changing mix of occupations. The NSC has applied this skills focus both to analysing the present  state of the labour market and examining what lies ahead.  

The NSC’s Australian Skills Classification (ASC) is a new analytical tool that maps the skills profiles for  around 600 occupations, detailing core competencies, which are common to all jobs and otherwise known as ‘employability skills’ or ‘foundational skills’. 

The ASC provides a consistent language and a way to compare the level of competency across occupations using 10-point scale technology tools, such as software or hardware required in job specialist tasks, which are the work activities a person undertakes specific to a job. 

Specialist tasks change more frequently than core competencies and are useful for differentiating occupations. Groups of specialist tasks can be clustered together to form 279 skills clusters, which in turn group into  29 skills cluster families. Skills that are like one another are clustered together – so if you can do one  task in a skills cluster, you are likely to be able to do the others. This enables a more systematic way of thinking about transferable skills, and allows us to judge how well someone’s skills, based on their past  employment, might match current vacancies.  

The BETA version of the Australian Skills Classification is on the National Skills Commission website: nationalskillscommission.gov.au. 

The NSC has also developed other new tools and techniques to help analyse the labour market. These include: 

• A Skills Priority List that outlines occupations in shortage and their expected future demand.  Released in June 2021, the list assesses nearly 800 occupations, drawing on NSC data, surveys of  employers and stakeholder engagement.  
• Nowcast of Employment by Region and Occupation (NERO), is an experimental monthly data set  that provides timely information on employment in 355 occupations across 88 regions in Australia.  Until now, this type of data was only available every 5 years.  
• The Vocational Education and Training National Data Asset is being developed by the NSC and the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to provide robust evidence on the employment outcomes from vocational education and training. 
• Skills Tracker developed by the NSC in partnership with the ABS, looks at the skills of employed and unemployed people. 
• Emerging and trending skills information draws on real-time job advertisements using data from Burning Glass Technologies.

Access the full National Skills Commission report here.

Date posted Apr 28, 2022