With the nation focussing on skills shortages in the workplace, Charles Sturt University (CSU) researchers maintain that older employees could hold the key to meeting these shortages.

 

Professors Andy Smith, Eddie Oczkowski and Chris Selby-Smith from the University’s Faculty of Commerce recently won a $70 000 grant from the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) to study how employers can retain and better use skilled people already in their workplaces.

 

“With national unemployment currently around five per cent, Australia, like many other countries, has been plagued by chronic skills shortages in most sectors of the economy,” said research team leader Professor Smith. 

 

“Employers consistently report that they cannot find employees with the right skills to fill job vacancies. In the past, employers have generally looked to government to help to solve the problem of skills shortages – usually by spending more money on training apprentices and trainees or increasing skilled immigration.

 

“But the research shows that the shortage of qualified workers is not due to a lack of apprentices and trainees. Since the mid 1990s, there has been a massive expansion in apprenticeships in Australia. We now have more apprentices and trainees per head of population than any other country. Nor will migration fill the gap – every country is chasing the same skills as we are.”

 

Professor Smith believes that solutions to the crisis could come from employers themselves.

 

“Often employers believe that their workforces should be trained in the skills that the business needs. The focus has tended to be on recruiting people, especially new young recruits with those skills, but we need to look also at retraining skilled people and using existing employee’s skills more effectively.

 

“The rapid ageing of the Australian population is exacerbating this problem, forcing employers to think about using the latent skills and abilities of their existing, often older, workers. We are also confronted by the issue that sometimes employers have people with the right skills but they cannot retain them or use their skills effectively in the business because working conditions are poor.”

 

The study, consisting of a national employer survey and a series of case studies is due to finish in 2007.

 

NCVER is Australia's principal research and evaluation organisation on vocational education and training in Australia and is a not-for-profit company owned by the Federal, State and territory ministers responsible for training.

 

This research project is part of a program managed by NCVER on behalf of the Australian, State and Territory governments, with funding provided through the Federal Department of Education, Science and Training.