Australian Government non-response to the Future of Work and Workers Report

The Australian Government response to the Future of Work and Workers report, has been released. Unfortunately, despite the titles, this is not a response to the report, just a statement of what the government was already doing.

The Future of the Canberra Workforce

Professor Phil Lewis, from University of Canberra, talked last night at the Australian Computer Society/ISACA Canberra joint meeting on "The Future of the workforce: Drivers and Challenges".

Phil pointed out that in the seventies many people worked in manual labor, but now more than 80% are in the service sector. Also less than 4% of the workforce are in mining and agriculture. Most of the mining jobs are in the city, with most mine-site work done by remotely monitored machinery.

Phil pointed out that it now takes longer for university graduates to get a job, but "Don't worry, you will still get a job". However, the biggest indicator of employability is school leaving: those who did not complete grade 12 have difficulty getting any job. A TAFE diploma, university degree or higher degree results in better job prospects. An investment in a degree is still worthwhile, unless, Phil mischievously suggested, you do creative arts.;-)

Phil suggested that Australian employers, unlike those in Germany, expect university graduates to be "job ready". In contrast German employers expect to have to train their employees, after their general eduction.
One question from the audience was about small businesses empowered by the Internet. This was a good question and I have one of these businesses. However, Phil pointed out that the statistics show that the proportion of people employed in small business has decreased. He pointed out that the opportunity cost of running a business in Australia is high. There are ways around some of the costs. As an example, I get low cost indemnity insurance through the ACS.

One interesting question from the audience was what do recent international graduates of Australian universities do to get a job. The graduates get a visa to work in Australia but companies in Canberra are reluctant to hire them as they do not have permanent residency. One solution, I suggest, is to take advantage of the help provided by the ACT Government to set up a company and contract yourself out.

ps: On 27 June, the Australian Computer Society released its Digital Pulse Report, on jobs and education in the IT sector. On 4 June I talked to an Australian Senate Committee on the Future of Work and Workers.

On the Future of Work and Workers

On 4 June I talked to an Australian Senate Committee on the Future of Work and Workers, at Parliament House in Canberra, alongside Rob Fitzpatrick, CEO of the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA), and just after the ANU VC. The committee had my short written submission, but here is the Question and Answer:

"Mr Worthington : I'm an honorary lecturer in computer science at the Australian National University where I teach computer professional skills, and I'm a member of the professional education governance committee of the Australian Computer Society, where I help set the education standards for computer professionals, but I'm making this submission in my own individual capacity as an educator.

 

You've heard from others about how technology is going to eliminate many jobs, and I would agree with the estimates of somewhere between 10 to 40 per cent of jobs. Some of my colleagues in the IT profession in Australia are effectively helping that happen. Workers will need better soft and technical skills. They will also need regular retraining because they will have multiple careers. I guess I'm an example of that. I started as a computer programmer with the government, working for the defence department. I've been retrained with a second skill as an educator, being trained in Australia and in North America.

 

Australia already has an education system which could provide work-ready learning across schools, vocational and higher education, and I suggest that we just need to tweak it a bit to make it more flexible. We need to strengthen the vocational education and training—VET—sector, so that it will blend between secondary education and universities. We need to fix up the conditional loans schemes so that they can be applied to the VET sector more freely.

 

We need to make university more flexible where the assumption isn't that someone does a three-year degree full-time and the exceptions are part-time people. The assumption should be that people will do smaller subdegree qualifications. The Vice-Chancellor of ANU mentioned microcredentials. They'll be doing those part-time and mostly online, not on campus, in response to the needs they have in the workplace. Actually most university courses are already blended. They're already mostly online and partly on campus as we speak, but that's not reflected in government policy or the rhetoric of universities mostly. 

 

We have a particular problem with international students. Regulations require them to be enrolled full-time all the time and that imposes a burden on people doing the education because, if a student fails or drops one subject, they have a problem. So I think we need to make that more flexible and allow them to do part of that online and allow them to do less than a full-time load.

 

We need to address soft skills more in our university system. I help do that at the ANU with the TechLauncher program where we have teams of students working on real problems for real clients in Canberra. These are skills that can be taught, but the problem is that the people teaching them—university academics—generally don't have the skills to do the teaching. We need to ask our university lecturers to be formally qualified in teaching I believe, which is a problem because university professors like to make other people do courses but they don't like to do them themselves. So I think that will need some encouragement via funding and perhaps some regulation in the system. That's about all I had to say. I welcome questions.

 

CHAIR: Thanks, Mr Worthington. At this point I might exit and hand over to Senator Patrick. I hope to be back before you finish up.

 

ACTING CHAIR ( Senator Patrick ): Thank you, Chair. Perhaps I'll start in reverse order. Mr Worthington, you describe your own situation as having changed throughout your career. I myself have managed a number of engineers over time. There is a progression we currently have in engineering where you might be a computer scientist then perhaps either go off in a different direction to management or broaden yourself from computer science to hardware to then algorithm development and some other disciplines, so you become multidisciplined. So is there really a change that is taking place or are you simply leveraging off your past knowledge and steering your career perhaps to a higher level?

 

Mr Worthington : I think there is a change. You need to learn new skills in a new area. The problem comes when you need to learn them relatively quickly. One of the examples given in the previous evidence was about cybersecurity. I help teach some people who are going to go into that area and that involves for technical people issues of human behaviour, international relations, the law and all sorts of things that they weren't previously familiar with. So I think this not just a matter of degree but a matter of learning new things. 

 

It can also be that they're not necessarily at a higher level of abstraction—for example, to teach in the Australian vocational education sector I had to go to TAFE and learn TAFE teaching, even though I was already giving lectures at universities. I had to learn a different way to approach it. I could've said: 'That's TAFE teaching. That's a low level. Why do I have to get that?' But I had to learn a different way of teaching, so I went to the appropriate place to learn those types of skills. I think we'll see people having a grab bag of little qualifications and different skills they get from different forms of institutions.

 

ACTING CHAIR: I guess I was suggesting that as you move along in your career and you do make changes there are, really, additional skills that you're learning which complement the next thing that you're doing. You don't end up giving away some of those past skills that you have learnt.

 

Mr Worthington : I wouldn't agree with that. For example, I tutor teams of students writing computer software and I have to say to them, 'The commuter programming languages I learnt stopped being used before you were born, so I can't help you with the technical aspects of your code. I can help you with how to talk to the client, how to manage the team, how to plan and strategise, but for the technical elements of this I am no longer confident in this area.' 

 

ACTING CHAIR: I think there is a place for people who can install a program in assembly language. It's still okay!

 

Mr Worthington : Yes, but they've stopped using some of the processes I used as well.

 

ACTING CHAIR: Sure.

 

Mr Worthington : I don't think it's just a matter of adding to your skills. There'll be many skills that are no longer relevant. AI was mentioned. There'll be things that used to be seen as a very important technical skill. Now the computer does it, and what was your main bread and butter nobody really wants. 

 

ACTING CHAIR: I noticed you were in my line of sight when I was asking about the 10 per cent versus 40 per cent. You seemed to be nodding on the 10 per cent.

Mr Worthington : It's somewhere in between 10 and 40 per cent for jobs disappearing. Nobody really knows. I think there's a view out there that all this technological development happens in a smooth, planned way. But, having seen it from the inside, we're making it up as we go along and we don't really know, when we produce some new technology, whether it's going to take off or not, whether people will really accept automated self-driving processes or not. So, to a large extent, we don't know. 

 

ACTING CHAIR: That's the cruise-control example I was using: a safe way to get, eventually, to automation but it may not happen quickly, or maybe there's some point where it suddenly takes off. I guess these things are hard to predict.

 

Mr Worthington : Yes. I have people come up to me every week and say, 'Hey, look, we've invented a new' something. And I go, 'Yes, and what can you use it for, and will anybody want it?' They're the really hard questions. 

 

ACTING CHAIR: Yes. I ran an R&D cell. I had 30 ideas pop before me per week and every once in a while one of them had a market, so I know where you're coming from. You talk about the development of new technology as being something that Australians want to have happen. Noting that, from my experience, you need to do the R&D stage, then you need to move to prototyping, then to manufacturing, and get the feedback loop into the development cycle, are we in some sense handicapped because of our shrinking manufacturing sector? ..."

From: Select Committee on the Future of Work and Workers 04/06/2018, Senate Hansard, Australian Parliament 

Educating the Future Workforce

The Select Committee on the Future of Work and Workers has invited submissions on the impact of technological change. Here are some thoughts on the subject of how well the education system suits the need for a more flexible workforce.

Australia needs an education system which is short sharp and mobile.

The Australian education system already allows for work-ready learning across schools, VET, and university. Some minor adjustments are needed to make the system more flexible:

1. Strengthen the VET system and have it blended with secondary schooling at the lower end and university at the upper end. Students should be able to complete a VET qualification at secondary school, go on to further study in the VET system (while working part-time) and then to university.

2. Make the university system more flexible: Encourage universities to offer nested, standardized programs which offer sub-degree entry and exit points. Students should be able to start with a sub-degree program and then continue their studies for a degree. Most university courses are already blended, but government policy and university practice need to recognize that most university students now, in effect, studying on-line so they can work at the same time.

Teachers computing skills should be developed as part of their standard formal education, not some ad-hoc bolt-on program. Teachers teaching computing should be full, formally, dual-qualified in computing and teaching. Australia already has better systems for doing this than the UK.

Students should be encouraged to undertake STEM subjects at school, through subjects which address real-world issues of concern to students and having computer professional role models with whom  students can identify. This requires, for example, project-based work addressing issues such as climate change.

Innovation and hacking competitions can help make make STEM look exciting for students. 

Rather than focusing on traditional campus-based three-year university degrees, I suggest policy should prioritize on-line, nested, programs which offer sub-degree entry and exit points, with the flexibility to study off-campus.

Soft skills can be addressed in specific university courses and project work. Soft skills figure prominently in the ANU's "TechLauncher" programs of groups project work, which I help teach. 

Techlauncher students undertake team building exercises and have mentors, tutors, and clients with industry experience. Some of this looks like fun, where students play with Lego, but there is also a lot of hard work on team and client relationship skills. E-portfolios can also be used.

Also, we need teachers in schools, VET, and university, who have training and formal qualifications in how to teach these skills. This is particularly a problem in universities where academic staff have higher research degrees, but minimal teacher training. Academics need formal teaching qualifications.


Diversity can be improved by offering STEM subjects which address real-world issues of concern to students and having computer professional role models who students can identify with. This requires, for example, female computing teachers.

As well as students fresh out of school, the same techniques can be used for re-skilling adults. On-line and blended learning, incorporating recognition of prior learning (RPL) and recognition of concurrent learning (RCL) are particularly useful. E-portfolios can be used for ensuring skills standards are met. Australia's VET system was set up with this need in mind.

For more on this, see my book  "Digital Teaching In Higher Education:  Designing E-learning for International Students of Technology, Innovation and the Environment".


Disclaimer: Tom Worthington is a computer professional, who advises on using technology for teaching and also does some part-time teaching of computing at tertiary institutions. While an Honorary Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the Australian National University and a member of the Professional Education Governance Committee of the Australian Computer Society, his views do not necessarily reflect those of either organization.