Expert perspectives on the skills shortage

AIRAH’s recent Industry Night in Melbourne kicked off with a panel session to explore the skills shortage in our sector. Perspectives on the issue – and some potential solutions – were provided by Jenny Mitchell, General Manager, Policy & Advocacy, Engineers Australia; David Keegan, Principal Consultant, New Venture Recruitment; and David King, Program Manager – Air Conditioning and Refrigeration, RMIT.

Industry impacts

As a recruiter who has been sourcing engineering talent for Australian companies in HVAC and building services for more than 15 years, David Keegan said that there has always been a talent shortage, but it has become more pronounced recently.

According to Keegan, the weeks or sometimes months it takes to hire new engineers is affecting project timelines.

Also, due to labour shortages, people are progressing into more senior roles more quickly.

“The downside of that is we are probably seeing more burnout than in the past,” he said. “People are taking on more responsibility in their position than they are necessarily ready for.”

Jenny Mitchell said that Engineers Australia has long highlighted the perennial shortages in the engineering workforce.

“Some studies say we need about another 100,000 engineers by 2030. There’s data that says 70,000 engineers are retiring in the next 10–15 years. And meanwhile. students in engineering are dropping.”

But Mitchell says these numbers mask a more nuanced situation. Some areas of engineering are feeling the squeeze more than others, and there is also massive underutilisation of skilled migrants.

“About 60 per cent of our workforce are overseas qualified engineers, but they’re facing barriers to getting employment. So you see reports of qualified engineers driving Ubers, for example,” she says.

Mitchell pointed out that the shortages are not only causing project delays, but also lags in innovation and introducing new sustainable processes.

David King offered a perspective from both the engineering and trade perspective. He noted that one engineer needs multiple skilled people to do the hands-on work, making the shortage more acute at the trade level. He also noted that the TAFE system is under extreme pressure, in terms of teachers and resources.

Fixing problems – it’s what we do

The panel then turned to potential solutions.

Keegan suggested some short-term measures, such as tweaking working holiday visa rules to allow engineers from the UK and Ireland to spend more than the current limit of six months with one company.

But he also highlighted other factors affecting migrant engineers in Australia – the cost of labour, for example.

“The cost of labour for the vast majority of projects that I’m seeing for my clients is somewhere around 70 per cent,” he said. “You compare that to other parts of the world and it flips – you have 70 per cent cost of materials and 30 per cent labour.”

This means that project managers from other parts of the world are used to working with more engineering resources.

“So for them to adapt to the Australia market is difficult,” he said. “I think there is something we can be doing in the industry to help them understand the processes in the market, that would be a big advantage.”

Mitchell said that Engineers Australia’s Global Engineering Talent Program is designed to do just that. The program is piloting in Queensland and the Northern Territory with government support.

“The idea is that overseas-qualified engineers can do a three-month placement, and there has to be a job available at the end of the placement,” she said. “We are trying to overcome specific barriers that we found when we did research, and it did go a lot to those cultural things around workplace.”

In the trade space, King noted that Australia is limited to how it can access migrant workers because of local licensing requirements and an inability to recognise some overseas qualifications.

“You bring someone in who’s got a qualification, is earning a good income, then all of a sudden you tell them they have to go back and do a three-and-a-half year apprenticeship. That’s something they may not be interested in,” he says.

King suggests that consistent licensing requirements across states would help, as would better recognition of qualifications, not just from overseas, but within in Australia, to build better pathways between the trade and engineering.

Trusting technology

During the Q&A session, one of the audience members asked whether technology, including AI, could help us overcome the skills shortage.

Mitchell noted that Engineers Australia recently completed research on how engineers are using generative AI.

“What we found was that AI is not coming for jobs, it’s coming for tasks,” she said. “We will still always need a human engineer to have that oversight and that ethics lens.”

According to Mitchell, another interesting aspect that came through the research was that newer engineers would rely on AI and not learn basic tasks and first principles. This could lead to a different kind of skills shortage.

King, meanwhile, shared a conversation from one of RMIT’s decarbonisation working groups, which investigated AI and found that the labour saved through the technology could actually lead to greater emissions because of the processing power required.

Future visions

The panellists finished the session by sharing their vision of where they would like the industry to be in five years.

Keegan said that everyone has to be involved to sell the benefits of our industry, such as the long-term prospects and job security for those working in the sector.

King said he hopes there will be a better pipeline for talent, with stronger articulation between secondary school and VET, and better-defined pathways for students.

Mitchell said that governments will need to take our engineering capability more seriously. This could be spurred by demand for engineering skills between areas such as the energy transition, decarbonising heavy industry, the infrastructure pipeline, housing, and AI systems.

“The competition will be so fierce that we will need an uplift,” she said. “I think we will see some concerted effort from government around our engineering capability. I’d like to see us setting some targets to grow that workforce. And I hope that if the government does that, it will attract more young people into these careers.”

The Melbourne Industry Night where the panel was held saw 80 exhibitors and more than 550 attendees, a record number for the event.

Image (from left): David Keegan, Jenny Mitchell, and David King.