Ahmad Ismail is an electrical engineer from Qatar with more than 20 years’ experience. He came to Australia in 2022 through a skills visa because of this shortage. He completed his engineering degree at the University of Edinburgh and his masters at the University of Wollongong. Even though he has extensive experience on large electrical infrastructure projects overseas, he still can’t get a job here.
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In October, Activate Australia’s Skills – an alliance campaign led by Settlement Services International and supported by more than 90 business groups, unions, not-for-profits and community organisations, including CEDA – came together to call for urgent reforms to how we recognise workers’ skills.
The call is not about lowering quality standards. Quite the opposite. It’s about making sure we match skills efficiently. The barriers that block people from finding a job that matches their skills have little to do with their experience. Instead, they are caused by excessive costs, outdated processes and needless bureaucratic hoops.
Most of us have ridden in an Uber driven by an engineer, met a physiotherapist packing groceries, or visited an understaffed hospital or aged care home that desperately needs more nurses, doctors and carers. There are hundreds of thousands of similar stories.
Our separate work in this space yields the same conclusion: activating the skills of workers trained overseas is key to an urgent boost to Australia’s skilled workforce. If we can match the right people to the right jobs, we can increase the availability of important services such as healthcare, childcare and aged care.
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This will also help lift sagging productivity. When economists speak about productivity, it’s not front-page news, but it’s important for our living standards and ability to innovate.
You may ask, what does productivity mean other than “more output for less input”? To be more productive, we must effectively match skills to jobs. The more easily people can move into jobs that match their skills, the more productive they are likely to be. They’re happier too.
Some simple changes can help make our skills and qualifications-recognition system work better for everyone: create a national oversight body, streamline processes and make it more affordable and accessible for professionals trained overseas. Such steps would help us build the future made in Australia we want to see.
Melinda Cilento is chief executive at the Committee for Economic Development of Australia and Violet Roumeliotis is CEO of Settlement Services International.
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