Welcome to Pondering Careers, where we get to share ideas about skills, work, and supporting young people. There’s been a lot happening lately, and I’ve been a bit slack with these newsletters, so this time will be a slightly different format – I’ll catch you up, then talk about some important skills reforms that have been flagged. It looks like the government here is considering some big changes to how we manage those who are out of work, and I’m going to talk through what this means to all of us.
But first, the catchup. If I’m honest, I’ve gone waaaaay deep down the skills rabbit hole and am starting to make some real progress. My schedule was blissfully quiet for the past few weeks which gave me lots of time to think deeply and spend far too long on my computer, but now things are solidifying it’s time I come up for air and get out and about a bit more.
Yesterday I visited the JCU Ideas Lab to talk about one of my favourite topics – AI and the Future of Work – with the Impact10X crew, Dr Samantha J. Horseman and Omer Bernstein which is usually heaps of fun but this time it was slightly more nerve-wracking because most of the people in the room knew as much as I do about AI! Watch the full presentation below:
I had quite a few people come up afterwards to talk about how we can get this message out to more people which was great as well.
Earlier this week Rob Sattler was in Brisbane for the Powering Skills Organisation Roadshow with Polly Britten CF (very jealous I didn’t get to go) and it’s so great to start getting out to more of these important events. As we’re learning more about how skills are understood across contexts, it’s becoming clear that people everywhere are facing problems of the same shape. Check out Rob’s video overview for more. Rob’s also going to be at the CAA New Careers Advisor Day in Sydney next week so pop over and say hi if you’re going to be there – once again, I’m very jealous I don’t get to go but also trying to prioritise spending time with the kids before they aren’t kids any more!
Speaking of skills and pathways, last week I got the chance to speak with Dr Tanmay Bagade, Chair of Medical Admissions at the University of Newcastle on The Ponderers – you can watch the replay here:
It was such a good conversation because we got to go beyond the usual ‘here’s how you apply’ stuff and looked at some of the deeper issues aspiring doctors should be considering. Medicine is such a popular field, and I think that’s justified, but it’s also become so big that it kind of overshadows a stack of equally amazing adjacent careers which offer more impact and bigger challenges to work on. Tanmay was incredibly generous with his time and the full video is well worth a watch if you’re working with anyone aspiring to work in healthcare.
The other ‘news’ related item to mention is that I’ve been taking on more work advising on Learning Design for other organisations in our space, and it’s been a really lovely opportunity to work with more people and outside of my normal year 7-12 scope. I’d be interested in expanding this work, especially as we dive deeper into the skills project, so please let me know if you would be interested in collaborating on anything. If you’d like to learn more about the skills project itself check out the resources at Common Flow here. There’s a nifty new interactive tool where you can compare the main Skills Taxonomies and see how they align.
The Future of Employment
With all the news out of the way let’s dig into the topic for this edition – which is the ‘future of employment’, both how it’s viewed by the Australian Government, and in terms of how we could shape things for the better.
Yesterday the Australian Government released a plan for comprehensive employment services reform – you can read Amanda Rishworth‘s Press Club address here for more context – and there’s a lot to unpack. I wasn’t planning on talking about this right now, but I’ve just submitted my response to the Discussion Paper (you can do the same here) and figured it’s a now-or-never kind of topic, so here we are.
I’m seeing a few other people start to speak about this as well; Kate Montgomery shared her insights on the implications for a broader place-based approach and Australian Spatial Analytics talked about how stream three in particular – which is designed to deliver intensive services for those who need the most support – could help them expand their work with young autistic adults:
As a job-focused social enterprise, we know that when provided the right environment, young autistic adults facing an appalling 34% unemployment rate can thrive in ‘big data’ professions
My own position on these reforms is a little more removed. I’ve worked with Digital Job Seekers while I was at the National Careers Institute, and it was genuinely one of the most rewarding jobs I’ve ever had, but other than that in the past I’ve mostly worked with people still in education – by definition, they’re never also job seekers because they’re actively training. I do, however, think that the underlying message within the proposed reforms goes beyond an approach that only affects those who are currently in receipt of workforce support services (i.e. currently unemployed and receiving welfare benefits while looking for work).
This is a system which for decades has become more and more removed from its intended purpose. Participants are often seen as product – sources of revenue for service providers who are often for-profit and based overseas. Really, this is the same problem we have with social media giants who treat our young people as sources of revenue and exploit their personal data for profit.
If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product…
Incentives are applied to try to encourage providers to do the right thing, but there are far too many people (both using and serving the system) who know how to game it, which isn’t good for anyone.
Right now, according to the Discussion Paper only 22.7% of people ‘achieve a sustainable employment outcome’ – which means they find a job and keep it for 6 months. The unemployment rate is historically low, but the number of people in the Workforce Australia system for 5 years or more is on the rise, see the graph below:
In other words, for every person who successfully finds work through the system there’s another person who’s been stuck in it for over 5 years. Which, as Liz Duffy said yesterday when we were going through the document together is not great ROI, since the system costs the Australian taxpayers $2B to operate each year.
There are implications here. I don’t want to find myself in a position where I need these services, but stranger things have happened, and you can’t rule it out. We should all be concerned that the service that’s set up to be our safety net – to help us find decent, sustainable work when we can’t find it alone – is not set up to actually help. We should also be concerned that the people with most complex needs and the most disadvantage are also offered the same approach as someone reentering the job market from a position of relative strength.
Which is why I think this Discussion Paper, and our collective response to it, is so important. We need to be paying attention and lending our voices in support of change that has the potential to benefit so many (did I mention you can submit your response here?)
No longer one-size-fits-all
The proposed reforms are truly a breath of fresh air. Core Ideal 1 gets right to the heart of it for me:
Core Ideal 1 – Employment is the primary goal. Meaningful engagement moves participants into work or closer to jobs. Services help them become capable, confident, and qualified and the settings for mutual obligations are designed to enable this.
They are considering removing the one-size-fits-all approach and replacing it with three streams of service: the first will support people with an online platform and support when they are close to the labour market, the second stream resembles the existing provision to a large degree, with more flexibility in the type of supports offered, and a move to more localised providers (more on that in a minute), while the third stream provides intensive support similar to that already being provided by many work-focused Social Enterprises across the country – check out the work Ricky Esterquest is doing with Towards Better for an example of what this looks like in practice.
This stream is the bit that is genuinely ‘new’ – we’ve had online job seekers for a while, and the targeted provision of stream two is more of a tweak than a new service, but the intensive stream is not something we’ve seen done at scale like this before.
The intent is that people will be able to move between the streams, receiving the type of support at each stage that is most likely to help them reconnect with the workforce. This could be mentoring, workplace experiences, targeted volunteering, skill development, or anything else needed. They also acknowledge that frontline staff across the board, but particularly in stream three will need qualification and experience commensurate with the task – skilled case managers who are supported and (hopefully) remunerated properly.
This is a big piece of work, and it’s not something that can really be taken on board by the existing providers which is why I’m so pleased that they’ve stated up front they’re planning to work with existing Social Enterprises to get the program off the ground and keep it local and sustainable in the long run.
A local move
The second big idea I take from the proposed reform is a shift from the standardised, national approach, where services are provided at scale by a small number of large providers, to a localised diverse service that is capable of adapting to the needs of their community. The shift here is significant, and I’m sure it’s going to ruffle some feathers at the top end of the job services town, but it’s a necessary one if we want to start responding to actual need and clearing some of the backlog.
I’m assuming the online stream one will remain mostly delivered at a national level, although wouldn’t it be great to see them continue to offer access to conversations with qualified career counsellors as part of this stream (fingers crossed). But the second and third tiers are intended to be offered by localised providers; people who are already connected with the local employment ecosystem, and who can do the work of rebuilding a system which is aware of where the jobs are. Engaging with employers is critical if the new system will succeed, indeed, there’s an entire section in the Discussion Paper on engaging with employers which hopefully will go some way to addressing the barriers employers face when engaging with the system.
There are really two issues at play here – first, there’s not enough incentive for employers to want to engage with either the system or those in the system, and second, the processes required to engage with the system are complicated and time-consuming. Taken together this means that employers are often unable to engage at all, and while they may face skills shortages within their organisation there are other available solutions which are easier, more cost effective, and more likely to lead to success.
I’m also hoping that a move towards more localised services may increase the quality of the frontline staff working with participants. We know from looking at existing career provisions within the education system that local providers who have the scope to build deep connections with industry are able to bring more opportunities to their students – Link and Launch in Queensland is a fabulous example of this in practice – so I would like to see that staff working in streams two and three also have experience and existing connections with building local networks. From my response:
“This is something I often see in really effective careers and employment services; they will have dedicated people who are able to build and nurture deep connections with local employers and industry, with the capacity to attend employment and industry events and capacity to continually seek out new connections. This kind of practice improves the pool of employers willing to work with job seekers, and increases the number and quality of job options available to individuals within the program. But this is hard work which requires a dedicated point of contact within every service provision, not only so that the work is being actively undertaken but also so employers and industry have a single and clear point of contact to work with.”
As most of us who work in career development know, this kind of work regularly overlaps with mental health care. One of the questions asks what qualifications and experience should be expected of frontline staff, and in my view experience and/or qualifications in social work, career development, rehabilitation counselling, mental health, counselling, or working with vulnerable populations should be a requirement for all frontline staff at all levels.
These types of changes have the potential to transform how we support job seekers in Australia.
Final thoughts
It’s still early days really, and, as the Minister said, “this is major reform.” For that reason, we can’t know how this will shake out in reality, but I can’t help but think that the proposed changes are taking us back towards a system that looks more like the old Commonwealth Employment Service (CES) than I really expected. Occasionally while we’re in the office Rob will bring out his old stories about visiting the CES in the early 90s to find his first job at 14 years (BigW) – from his account it was an easy and positive experience, just part of normal life.
The CES was a post-WWII initiative, designed to help those who had returned from war with disabilities and struggled to find suitable work. For over 40 years, the service was a part of life for all Australians, and virtually all job vacancies passed through their system which meant the system worked for everyone, not just those who were unemployed. In the 90s, some bright spark (*cough* Paul Keating *cough*) started dismantling the system by opening it up to private providers and paying for specific outcomes, and the job was finished by John Howard a few years later. By the time I left school in 2001 it was long gone; I never even knew it existed.
Perhaps this shift away from large, private providers who use the service to generate a profit might signal a return to a system which has more in common with the CES? A girl can dream…
