The RBA revealed new ABS data on employment trends yesterday.

There is no real surprise that the Australian economy is dominated by the services sector (refer chart below). Over a period of one year, sectors like professional service and health care added 60,000 full-time jobs. In contrast, the manufacturing sector shed more than 20,000 jobs in the same period.

Meanwhile, the Australian Industry Group released its latest PMI (Performance of Manufacturing Index) results, which recorded a slight increase in overall employment numbers. However, long-term prospects are not rosy.  Read more...

The findings from the latest CEO Survey, conducted jointly by Australia Industry Group and Deloitte, bring good news for third-party talent solution providers.

Firstly, three quarters of all businesses are planning to hire new staff in the next two years. The larger the company turnover the more bullish the hiring intentions;  almost 90% with revenue of $200 million intend to hire additional staff (refer chart). Confidence is high in the construction sector with 85.7% of respondents indicating they will hire new staff.  Read more...

The latest Business Characteristics Survey (BCS) conducted by the ABS shed interesting light on what skills are critical to businesses, and short in supply.

Survey participants were asked to list the type of skills used in undertaking core business activities (businesses can identify more than one type of skills). Trades (27%) and financial (26%) skills were most widely used, while scientific and research (4.6%) skills was used the least by businesses.  Read more...

Worth $19 billion and employing 289,000 people, the digital industry – which comprise of software, website, animation, video, computer games – contributes 3% of the nation’s GDP. In NSW alone there are 36,192 creative digital businesses operating. Without doubt, given our love affair with anything digital, the industry is growing fast.

A new research by Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) claims that skills shortage is acute in the digital industry and it is fuelling a $2 billion trade deficit. A survey of employers carried out early in the year found a disconnect between graduates and the skills required by employers.  Read more...

Money Quote

“Workforce planning and development is non-existent, our sector does not have the necessary employment data to analyse and forecast trends. Had this information been available, we may have been in a better position to identify our emerging skills requirements.” – Ray Pincombe, President,  Local Government Managers Australia  Read more...