Anonymous

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No response provided.

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Systems thinking is essential for solving complex, multi-faceted problems like inequality. The skills shortage, under-employment, and discrimination in employment are complex, multi-factorial problems requiring a systems approach. Systems thinking is a set of synergistic analytic skills used to improve the capability of identifying and understanding systems, predicting their behaviours, and devising modifications to them in order to produce desired effects (Arnold & Wade, 2015).   These skills work together as a system. Put simply, systems thinking is a holistic way to investigate factors and interactions that could contribute to a possible outcome.

In terms of priorities, there are two key priorities: quality of work and, relatedly, skill development. 
Insecure work has been clearly shown to be a growing problem in Australia. Research has consistently demonstrated that insecure work has detrimental physical health outcomes ranging from work, health, and safety injuries to serious illness caused by stress; and such a high rate of mental health outcomes that its growth is now recognised as a key psychological risk in the future of work literature. Beyond the individual worker the low and stagnant wages, common in insecure work, have been shown to exert downward pressure on wages across the board, contributing to widespread wage stagnation. High rates of insecure employment have been shown to contribute to a range of serious community and economic impacts culminating in economic and political inequality. As such, high-quality and secure work needs to be a central consideration and guiding principal for all employment creation.

High-quality work is, in part dependent on skill development. The future of skill development needs to focus equally on technical and non-technical skills across all sectors of employment. Current and future workplaces need employees who are ‘T-shaped’ where the vertical part of the ‘T’ represents the depth of their knowledge, technical skills or specialisation (e.g. proficiency in programming) and the horizontal part of the ‘T’ represents other broader skills (e.g. communication, creativity, emotional intelligence) which assist collaboration and application of expertise to other domains (Bodell, 2020) . Such employees are valuable and can be described as a hybrid between generalists and specialists (Bodell, 2020). Furthermore, possessing and applying skill variety is one of five core job dimensions that is positively associated with meaningfulness, motivation, performance quality and job satisfaction, promoting productivity and reducing absenteeism and turnover (Hackman & Oldham, 1975 ). 

REFERENCES

Arnold, R., & Wade, J. (2015). A Definition of Systems Thinking: A Systems Approach. Procedia Computer Science, 44( 2015), 669-678

Bodell, L. (2020). Why T-shaped teams are the future of work. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisabodell/2020/08/28/futurethink-forecasts-t-shaped-teams-are-the-future-of-work/?sh=19f4ab6f5fde

Hackman, J. R., & Oldham, G. R. (1975). Development of the Job Diagnostic Survey. Journal of Applied Psychology, 60(2), 159-170

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No response provided.

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There is need for greater systems thinking in project conception e.g. in regional areas and for skilled migration housing is a huge barrier. Engagement activities should include an emphasis on qualitative information drawn directly from those in vulnerable cohorts who have lived experience of engagement (actual end users) with the employment and skills/training systems. This could be achieved by surveys including free text comments, research that interviews participants to understand how the system works in practice and is experienced by end-users. 

Response:

Jobs and skills do not operate in isolation but are shaped by and are shapers of business performance, and therefore the macro economy. The needs (in terms of jobs and skills) ought therefore to be assessed in context – and that context should be reflected in the data that Jobs and Skills Australia collect, and, importantly, make available to the public. As a bare essential, JSA should:

-	Reimplement the Australian Workplace Relations Study (AWRS) and provide a link to the ABS Business Characteristics Survey (BCS)

New data is needed on workplace relations, including wages and wage setting, management-employee relations, financial management (including turnover, debt, and profitability), work-life-balance, employee and employer flexibility. 

-	Enhance the content in the BCS.

Jobs and Skills Australia should lobby the ABS to supplement existing questions and add new questions to the BCS. Existing questions about innovation could be expanded to include specifics of the type of innovation, where it originated, and its impact on the business in terms of employment, income, and sales. Further, tangible and intangible investment data would be useful.

-	Develop a module for ad-hoc questions into the AWRS.

Such a module would have provided useful information during the COVID-19 pandemic to obtain better data on employee retention, working-from-home policies. While the ABS did run a survey between February 2021 and June 2022 capturing business conditions and sentiment, this has now ceased.
 
-	Consider, where not already in place, data linking to allow AWRS/BCS data to be connected with other sources, such as Intellectual Property data made available by IP Australia 

Overall, JSA should reflect on how data on skills and occupational skills is collected and used. With the technological advancement anticipated by so many for the next decade or more, we need a much better understanding how job tasks and activities are or will be affected (if at all). We also need to know how businesses are responding to that change – does it adjust by changing the skills mix of its aggregate workforce, or does it change the roles of individual workforce members. The strategy adopted by business interacts with how and what type of occupational training is delivered. 

Response:

Jobs and Skills Australia needs a greater focus on priority industries including agriculture, the renewable energy sector, agriculture, and other green industries with a focus on both technology skills and change management skills for leaders. 

To do that Jobs and Skills Australia should identify the most significant and highest value opportunities for Australia to build complex, knowledge-intensive activities, sectors and subsectors. This poses challenges for a country like Australia which, due to deindustrialisation, has lost complexity dramatically. There are fewer opportunities as a result, and certain of the opportunities identified only using complexity will be subscale and of small significance for the national or regional economies. However, opportunities do exist. 

There are likely opportunities in the sectors of: agricultural machinery, mining and metals processing equipment, defence, medical devices, and environmental monitoring and energy technologies. Further research should be conducted to confirm priority industries in order to ensure they are sufficient for inclusion. 

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No response provided.

Response:

JSA currently provide quarterly labour market data and the internet vacancy index on the Jobs and Skills Australia website, the National Skills Commission website, and the Labour Market Insights website. A consolidation of the data across each of these sources as part of the setup of the Jobs and Skills Australia website would be helpful to simplify what data is available and up to date. As an example, the LMI portal provides labour market data based on Employment Regions – but this data does not appear on the JSA website. 

An overall simplification and streamlining of JSA data via integration with the existing data.gov.au portal would be welcome, and likely increase the reach and scope of JSA data. 

Further, JSA should consider where not already in place, making their data available to the ABS for data linking with other sources. 

Response:

The Australian Industrial Transformation Institute would welcome the opportunity to more rigorously contribute to any research or policy development in this area.