Skilling the country’s transition to clean energy is a major obstacle for Australia. Currently, there is a global shortage of workers due to multiple factors (Australian government & Jobs and Skills Australia, 2024) including aging populations, declining birth rates, higher rates of early retirement and other drivers (Bell et al., 2022).
With Australia’s position in the exports sector expected to grow and the emergence of a global green hydrogen export market (Graham & Havas, 2023), Australia must look to sourcing skills from overseas. To be successful, this involves positioning Australia as a destination of choice for employment for qualified migrants. When successful in attracting the workers there is also a need to ensure to retain them over the longer term. Part of this includes ensuring better support systems to secure engineering and other roles once they are in the country (Bell et al., 2022).
This project will implement a quantitative survey across the most common migrant ethnic groups in order to understand migrants’ experience of the job market in Australia. This will be complemented by a series of semi-structured interviews which explore these issues in more detail. Using a mixed methods design will ensure greater depth and breadth of insights and strengthen findings and increase validity (Ahmed et al., 2024; Wasti et al., 2022). It is expected that results will help address workforce shortages through recommendations for migration policy reform, to place Australia in a globally competitive position in attracting and retaining workers and increase the workforce talent pool available to Australian employers.
Partners: Curtin University
Project Leader: Prof. Emma D’Antoine
Duration: 9 months