Ms O’CONNOR – Thank you. I don’t know about shining. I’m just trying to find out a little bit about workforce shortages in the care sector. In about 2017, I think it was, there was an analysis of the shortage over the next decade, and it was projected to be a shortage as I understood it or recall it, of about 10,000 workers. What kind of mapping has been undertaken to understand the extent of projected need and how does that fit. I heard before about the Cert III in Individual Support and the thousand going through it in the last year, which is great. But how does that fit with Skills Tas’ focus because it’s a huge area of need.
Mr ELLIS – That’s right. It’s the biggest for us. You know, as I mentioned before vocational education course about hard hats and high-vis but it’s actually in the care sector that the biggest work needs to be done. We have an aging population. We also have for example different family structures. More women in work so that means more early childhood education and we have, you know, finally as a country recognised the importance of truly providing dignified services to people with disability.
So that’s actually the fastest growing workforce component in the country is to support people with disability. We mentioned before about our industry skills compacts and that’s an important way for us to continue to work together. The federal jobs and skills councils are also a – they’re almost a national kind of version of that and we’ve developed ours largely in parallel. They do a lot of work in terms of the data provision nationally for these different workforce challenges which we have. The care sector’s certainly huge in that. I’ll pass to the team in terms of the workforce mapping and the work that we’re doing with the industry.
Ms O’CONNOR – And what we’re likely to see in projected need over the next decade.
Ms CAIRNEY – Thank you. Through you, minister. I recognise the comments previously made about the projected growth in that area. I’ll touch first on the workforce development tools and resources that Skills Tasmania is looking at. So Skills Tasmania is investing in tools to support evidence-informed workforce planning. That includes an interactive labour force dashboard providing current and predicted workforce needs by region. We’re working on that tool now to provide some informed data to help inform decision-making.
Another body of work that Skills Tasmania has been involved in is the development of a community of practice within the department and across agencies. That’s to recognising how multi-faceted these workforce challenges are, be it from a housing perspective, a training perspective, socio-economic perspective. We’re looking at common workforce issues and looking for opportunities to collaborate and innovate across different agencies. That community of practice has met twice in 2024. I might, Alex, are you able to expand on the interactive dashboard?
Ms O’CONNOR – Yes, briefly. I was actually trying to understand what the projection of need would be. It’s good to know there’s work happening.
Ms PATERSON – Thank you. Through you, minister. I don’t have a number, but we certainly are doing this work through Victoria University to project relative areas of demand in terms of workforce and we are increasingly relying on the jobs and skills council. As the minister mentioned they’re doing a huge amount of really deep work and analysis and doing a lot of consultation. They’ve recently released the Early Childhood Education Care Capacity study which has sort of a national lens, so we’ll be increasingly looking at that work to inform our investment as well.
