Back to school for adults

Amongst the many significant challenges Australia faces in the decades ahead, the need for a National Workforce Planning Strategy looms large. But above all, what does such a strategy involve, and what does it mean for the local community?

To understand how such a strategy fits in to the broader landscape, we need to consider in particular some of the more important challenges on the horizon. Prime amongst these is our ageing workforce, with life expectancy anticipated to exceed 90 years of age for both men and women by 2050, resulting in lower unemployment rates, but higher job vacancy rates. One of the solutions to this challenge could involve changing the profile of job roles to provide more flexibility in the workplace. This means changing our focus on just wanting to attract generation y to a focus on retaining our older and mature workers. In many cases this means providing cross training and re-skilling and providing more structured pathways to employment through an increase in trades, tertiary and vocational training for mature aged workers.

Skills advisor and former Deputy Director of the United Nations Staff College, Les Pickett, believes such a focus is long overdue. “At the moment, recruitment companies and employers seem to focus all of their energy on attracting a younger workforce, only to find that the younger workforce is more demanding when it comes to job roles and pay,” he said. “The older workforce is just happy to have a job and we tend to forget the immense value this large group of people have in terms of knowledge and experience. If we were able to harness this energy and provide dedicated pathways to employment through education, then we would go a long way to also addressing the skills crisis.”

According to the CSIRO, the proposed carbon trading scheme could result in more than three million workers needing to be retrained and re-skilled by 2015. On its own, this warrants skills reform being made a priority area for federal and state governments. For the time being, the focus on a national education strategy is largely targeted towards school-based programs such as computers in classrooms, curriculum, literacy and numeracy. Important as this is, with lower numbers of younger people entering the workforce, the focus needs to be switched back to mature-age workers, with a renewed commitment towards supporting them in terms of training and retraining.

Paddington-based Metro Screen is a registered training organisation specialising in film. According to the company’s marketing manager, Katrina Beck, around 20 per cent of the 850-odd students which pass through its doors every year are over 40 years of age. “Conversion rates of graduates to employment is very high,” she said. “Our full-time students are assisted greatly to gain employment on completion of their Certificate IV in Screen, [and] our short course graduates have the opportunity to gain advice from our staff and tutors after their course, which assists them to gain employment. It is fair to say that the majority of graduates who actively seek employment will gain it.”

Council on the Ageing NSW CEO David Atkins supported the work of Metro Screen and like-minded businesses. “What we are experiencing is that mature-age workers are skilling down and leaving the workforce, while what we need is more strategies around the retention of mature-age workers and the preservation of their invaluable skills and knowledge,” he said. “The work of Metro Screen is heartening and we believe there is a great deal of scope in the community college environment to provide the re-skilling of older people, as well as the use of older people as trainers and mentors.”

by Scott Winter and Matthew Tutaki