How Jobs And Skills Australia Turns Labour Data Into Better Career And Workforce Decisions with Professor Barney Glover

In this milestone episode of the Reimagined Workforce podcast, I’m joined by Professor Barney Glover, Commissioner of Jobs and Skills Australia, to explore how data, insights and emerging technologies are reshaping the future of work.

Professor Glover leads a national body of work connecting labour market dynamics, skills systems and workforce planning. Supported by Deputy Commissioners Megan Lilly and Trevor Gould, the agency provides critical evidence to help individuals, organisations and governments make better workforce decisions.

In this conversation, we unpack key insights, including:

• Jobs and Skills Report 2025 – highlighting the need to align productivity, participation and skills. Nearly 90% of employment growth has come from service industries, and AI is augmenting rather than replacing work, increasing demand for human skills like communication and problem solving. 
• VET National Data Asset Report – demonstrating strong employment outcomes and income uplift for those completing vocational education. 
• Higher Education Outcomes Report – providing longitudinal insights into career pathways and earnings growth following university study. 
• Generative AI insights – reinforcing that most roles will be augmented, reshaping tasks and elevating cognitive and human capabilities. 
• Emerging priorities – including a shift to a skills-first economy and development of a National Skills Taxonomy to better define and deploy capability. 

We also explore key workforce challenges, including:

•  Misalignment between career aspirations and labour market demand 
•  The growing importance of vocational pathways alongside higher education 
•  The need for large-scale AI capability uplift 
•  Persistent participation gaps, including young people not in education, employment or training 
•  The role of inclusion and diversity in addressing skills shortages and improving productivity 

What becomes clear is that workforce planning is no longer just about headcount. It is about capability, adaptability and informed decision-making, underpinned by high-quality data.

As Professor Glover AO shares, the opportunity is not just to respond to change, but to anticipate it—using evidence to design a workforce that is more inclusive, productive and future-ready.

The Reimagined Workforce podcast is brought to you by Workforce Transformations Australia Pty. Ltd.
All opinions expressed are the speaker's and not the organisations they represent.
If you have a story about a workforce transformation to share and would like to be a guest on this podcast, please contact us at kathhume@workforcetransformations.com.au.
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Learn Solve Thrive: Making a difference that matters in a fast and complex world : Hume, Kathryn Lee: Amazon.com.au: Books

Transcript

Welcome And 50th Milestone

Kath Hume 0:09

This is the Reimagined Workforce Podcast, and I am your host, Kath Hume. Through my work, I'm privileged to have fascinating, thought-provoking conversations with people who inspire me and make me so optimistic about the future. They're rethinking how work gets done and how we might do that better. I am aware that not everyone is as fortunate. So I created this podcast to bring some of these conversations to others who share a passion for reimagination. Today's episode is a bit of a milestone, and I thought long and hard about who would be the perfect guest. Fortunately, I keynoted a conference with Professor Barney Glover late last year, and it became very clear that the work of Jobs and Skills Australia offers incredible value to anyone working in workforce strategy and capability development. It provides a clear line of sight between emerging skill needs, labour market dynamics, and the decisions we need to make today. For individuals and organisations, this means being better equipped to plan for what comes next. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. Welcome to a very special episode of the Reimagined Workforce podcast. This is our 50th episode, and I can't think of a better guest to help us explore how we might reimagine the future of work so that organisations and the people within them thrive. Joining us today is Professor Barney Glover, Commissioner of Jobs and Skills Australia. In many ways, Professor Glover embodies what I dreamed when I started this podcast. His work focuses on anticipating the future through evidence, using labour market insights and workforce data to help Australians prepare for what comes next and create brighter futures for individuals, organizations, and communities. Professor Glover brings remarkable breadth and depth of experience to his role. He previously served as Vice-Chancellor of Western Sydney University and Charles Darwin University. Throughout his career, he has contributed to education, research, and innovation through leadership roles across universities, governments, and industry. He also contributes more broadly through service on a range of boards and advisory boards, including the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, and internationally as an honorary professor at the University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City. His work across these roles reflects a deep commitment to expanding opportunity, strengthening the connection between education and employment, and ensuring workforce systems support thriving societies. On a personal note, it's a real pleasure to welcome Professor Glover. In my work in strategic workforce planning, I regularly rely on labour market insights produced by Jobs and Skills Australia to help organisations understand workforce trends and make better decisions about the future workforce. And I am incredibly grateful for that amazing service. I was actually speaking with a group from a European country recently, and I was showing them what we have available to us in Australia, and I have to say they were extremely jealous of what we have available to us. So hats off to everyone at Jobs and Skills Australia who makes that available to us. But Professor Glover, welcome to the Reimagined Workforce Podcast.

Professor Glover 3:31

Thank you, Kath. It's great to be with you and congratulations on 50. And I'm very pleased to be your 50th guest and very happy to be here and to chat about something I'm very passionate about, which is the Australian labour market and how we can help Australians to reach their full potential in the Australian labour market and to navigate the national skills system to get there. So very happy to be with you.

Kath Hume 3:55

Thank you, and as am I, I'm I'm absolutely thrilled that you agreed to be with us and to share your insights and to support others. And that's the dream that I had when I created the podcast. Was I was fortunate to be in many conversations and have access to lots of information and good people with great intelligence and willingness to share, and it's just very fitting that today I've got you as our guest. So thank you.

What Jobs And Skills Australia Does

Kath Hume 4:21

Thank you. I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what it is you do and why you love it so much.

Professor Glover 4:28

It's a very good question. Well, I'm the Jobs and Skills Australia Commissioner, which is a what's called an independent statutory officer position with the Australian government. So I'm an independent advisor to government and to the broader community, um, to all of the key stakeholders who have an interest in jobs and skills in Australia, and that's just about everyone. So providing advice. I have a team of people, including two deputy commissioners who support me, Megan Lilly and Trevor Gould are my two deputy commissioners, again, independent secretary officers, and a team of about 200 in Jobs and Skills Australia, relatively small agency, but it does a powerhouse of work, as you've outlined in your opening comments, Kath. It is truly, I think, a remarkably important part of the Australian government and the service we provide to people who are interested in the dynamics of our labour market and our skills system and how they're working effectively together or not so effectively together. Where are the tension points? What do I do? Well, I'm ultimately responsible for the whole body of work that is underway within Jobs and Skills Australia, which means there's a very significant amount of work that is focused on the workforce of today. What's happening today in the workforce? What are internet vacancies like? What is what's happening with employers and recruitment difficulty? What are we doing in skilled migration? All of these key point-in-time analyses of the Australian labour market, occupational shortages, core skilled occupation lists, all the sorts of very important business as usual parts of the mechanisms that help to inform and provide advice to policymakers and to the public more broadly. So all of that work, as well as the future-focused work, what's what do we anticipate happening in the labour market in the future? What do we see with employment trends into the future? What can we see happening in our skills system in the future? And then we do a range of big projects. Last year, for example, we did a big project on generative AI, and I took the lead on that project. The commissioners, deputy commissioners, and I take leads on various big projects, and I took the lead on that one. Megan Lilly took the lead on our gender economic equality study, a very, very big and important study last year. And Trevor Gould has been leading our work on foundation skills. We're doing a big, we just completed a big survey nationally of foundation skills, literacy, numeracy, and digital skills. And we're doing some work at the moment on in a project called Mutu Youngaland, which is focused on remote indigenous communities and how how we should consider and respond to issues around foundation skills in that very different context. So it's an exciting body of work. I lead the body of work. We make reports to governments and into the public domain. And importantly, I'm the spokesperson. I'm there talking to people like you, Kath, and many others who are interested in what's happening and to explain the work of JSA and to be there to help encourage people to think differently about the dynamics of our labour market. A lot of young people now, particularly post-COVID, sort of struggling with what direction should I take in life and what's what's the right choice of career path for me? And we provide, as you know, a raft of data sources that can help people in making those sorts of decisions and to understanding how to navigate our skill system and our labour market. So there's a big public relations role for the Commissioner. And today, for example, I've been involved in meetings with state and territory ministers to talk about state and territory priorities for Jobs and Skills Australia. So it is a very outwardly focused role, but also ultimately responsible for this incredible body of work by these very talented public servants.

Kath Hume 8:34

What I think is amazing is I was with a group of high school students, so year 10 students this week, we're looking at your occupational skills shortages list, for example. But then I go out into quite large organizations, and I and so it's accessible and usable for a range of different audiences. And I think what I love about it is that it's all working towards that same ultimate goal, is to have people in occupations that they enjoy, where they will thrive, where they can, as you said, live to their potential, and ultimately that's the best thing for our economy. Then we've optimized our human resources and the people within our societies. And I think there's a lot coming out, as you would know. You talked about leading that piece of work on AI, but I was listening to something earlier in the week, just around what's the impact of AI on going to be on loneliness and how are we reimagining work and to ensure that we're protecting that because as we all know, loneliness is becoming a really prominent problem in society. So I think the work that you're leading is just making such a huge difference in the lives of so many Australians. So one other thing that I really liked that you said that I really caught on is the whole premise of the reimagined workforce is that you're encouraging people to think differently. So where we've come from in the past is not where we're going in the future. So I love that you're anticipating the future and providing those insights. I know we can't predict the future, but giving us a hint and helping us to see what might happen so we can do that scenario planning and be better prepared.

Why Career Aspirations Miss Reality

Professor Glover 10:16

Yeah, no, it's very, very important. There was a very significant OECD study last year that provided an interesting insight into the career aspirations of 15-year-olds. So it's a very important study under their PISA program. And 750,000 15-year-olds were interviewed from 17 OECD countries, including Australia and New Zealand and many others. But the fascinating thing about the data that came out, and the troubling bit about the data, was that the top five, the top 10 occupations that young people were thinking that they'd like to be when they left school hadn't changed much in 30 years. And what was even more troubling was when you looked at it against where we see really dynamic change and growth in the labour market, they were almost diametrically opposite. In other words, they were choosing things where the opportunities were very limited and not where there is an enormous amount of growth in the future. So in Australia, the economy is dominated at the moment by growth in health care and social assistance and the care economy in Australia is growing significantly. We're seeing quite a shift from the producing industries to the to the service industries. It's been ongoing now for some time, and it our projections are that it will continue on. So when you talk to young people and they give you their career aspirations, and they're actually misaligned with opportunity, that's a challenge. It was also misaligned with a sense of, well, what sort of post-secondary education do I need as a 15-year-old? Are they thinking about tertiary education and the jobs of the future and reimagining the workforce of the future that they'll be part of? And often they were, they didn't have a sophisticated concept at age 15 of post-secondary education. Whereas we know at Jobs and Skills Australia that over 90% of the jobs of the future within the next five years will require post-secondary education qualifications. And we also know that in the Australian context, and it's very true elsewhere, I was actually talking to someone from the UK from our sister organization, Skills England, just earlier this week about some of the challenges that they're addressing in the UK and what we're looking at in Australia. But thinking about what we're seeing as an imbalance in our post-secondary education system in Australia. That is, we've had enormous reforms in post-secondary education, vocational training in higher ed, but we have overqualified the workforce in higher education and not qualified it enough in vocational training. 60% of the all of the jobs in the construction sector are in shortage because we're not generating young people interested in apprenticeships and careers in the construction industry. And we need that as a country that wants to build 1.2 million homes and create the jobs of the future that might be really interesting in a technology-rich environment. So we're needing to address this lack of parody of esteem between our vet sector and our higher ed sector, something in Europe you don't see to the same extent. The polytechnics in Germany and the universities live side by side and are highly regarded. In Australia, we don't have that sense between our TAFES and our universities. We should. We haven't got it yet. So we need to do a lot of educating of young people about wonderful career opportunities into vocational education and training and to grow our higher education system. This is not about curtailing that, but we need to see a significant in VET. One of the other troubling things that came out of the conversation I had with my colleague in England comes to your point a moment ago, Kath, about about loneliness and about mental health issues in general. We have in Australia at the moment a troubling set of data around people not in employment education or training, young people, 15 to 24 year olds. So in regional Australia, it's one in six young people are not in employment education or training. And in metropolitan Australia, it's one in ten. So not only are they not participating in the training system, they're not engaged at all in education or employment. And that's a worry. And that number has spiked. And we need to find out what's happening and how we can lift the aspiration of young people. And partly, that comes back to the quality of careers advice. And when you unpack quality careers advice, you end up at JSA. Because you end up, where's the evidence base? Where is the compelling data that tells a young person, well, what are the pathways that might take me from where I am to what I'd like to be, or possibly other things I'd like to be? I don't want to be locked into a single career pathway. The future is about many career pathways for us. It's not a single, you know, work in the same job for 40 years. It's going to be very different. So two of our really important, I think our most important reports from JSA every year. One is the VET National Data Asset Report, and the other is our higher education outcomes report. They both came out late last year. Now, these are both reports based on what's called PLIDA data. PLIDA is person-level integrated data asset of the Australian Bureau

VET Versus University And Shortages

Professor Glover 15:47

of Statistics. And this is where the ABS has linked a whole lot of data together from tax data to schools data to vet data to social services data. So we can track what happens to people as they move through education and training and ask the question what happens next? Does it make any difference to their lives? And not surprisingly, but impressively, in our VNDA report last year, on average, median income uplift. If you complete a vet qualification in Australia, you've got a median income uplift of about $15,000 a year in the first year or so of coming out of your VET qualification. That's great. You have a big uplift in employability, and you have a big uplift in opportunity to go to further study. And remarkably, over 40% of people who are on income support before they do their vet qualification come off income support from the government after. And that's a great example of how people are getting out of that intergenerational poverty challenge and moving into an opportunity to earn money and participate in quality jobs in the Australian labour market. So the VNDA data is incredible. VET National Data Asset, well worth looking at. You can actually interrogate it down to what happens if I do a CERT two in hospitality or I or do a CERT three in electrotechnology. It gives you all of that data about median income uplift and employability. Interestingly, side by side with that is our higher education outcomes data. And this is doing the same analysis for people who are completing their higher education qualifications. And we went back and we looked at what happened to them over five and ten years. So it's longitudinal data. And it is a remarkable story of success. On average, over the first five years, if you complete a degree, you have on average about a 35% increase in salary over the first five years. That's impressive. Um, and in some areas, you know, you do a nursing degree, you end up mostly in nursing, but not always in nursing. About 70-odd percent end up in nursing. Engineers, yes, mostly go into engineering, but not all of them. And then you have some other degrees, like a Bachelor of Arts, a Bachelor of Social Sciences, a Bachelor of Business, Bachelor of IT, that end up moving into a whole raft of different areas. And this, I think, is where young people who are thinking about the work in the future, imagining or reimagining the workforce of the future, can get a real sense of, wow, if I do this degree, look at all of the opportunities that come from that in these very, very different areas. And you start to say, well, yeah, this is not locking you in to a particular outcome. It's actually opening up a raft of outcomes. And one of the things I think is most important about that, coming back to the generative AI conversation we had, because you you have to reimagine the workforce of the future in the context of generative AI and agentic AI, that will be the transformation of our economy over the next few years will be the impact of Gen AI. But one thing that we see happening at the moment when we're thinking about and imagining the workforce of the future is the importance of the cognitive skills. So critical thinking, problem solving, communication, being able to work in a team, the whole raft of skills which are appearing now more frequently in job adverts because we analyze job adverts and less so technical skills. And we're also seeing a move towards skills as the basis for recruitment away from qualifications and credentials. And when you think of those cognitive and you think about that skills first framework for recruitment, it emphasizes the importance of the humanities, the arts and social sciences. Because the arts and social sciences and humanities are very much about those cognitive skills. That's very much what they teach in a whole raft of interesting areas of application and in different cognate areas and discipline contexts, all very, very important. So one thing that I say frequently, whenever I have a chance, is to say this is the renaissance of the humanities. Wow. Because we had concerns about various policy settings that have impacted on the humanities in higher education, the so-called jobs-ready graduate reforms and the impact that's had. And I think the generative AI revolution we're in and will continue, is going to require more and more people to have the skills that comes from an arts degree from an Australian university. So there's a lot that I think our reports, like Banda and higher ed outcomes, I think it tells a remarkably powerful story to young people and to people who are being

What Outcomes Data Proves

Professor Glover 20:54

disrupted in the labour market in various ways. You know, we're in whenever you have an industrial revolution, in this case it's a generative AI or an AI revolution, you have disruption and you have dislocation and you have job losses and new jobs emerge, and the ratio between them changes as the impact of the technology takes full effect. But when in that context and you're in a vulnerable area, then it's important to think about skilling and reskilling. And again, it's it's great to have that sense of well, what are the pathway opportunities? One thing that we recommended in our big Gen AI study last year was the critical importance of upskilling all Australians in their Gen AI skills. It's a major focus for this government in Australia to pick up this and to find ways through, I think, empowering our future skills organization, one of our great jobs and skills councils, under Patrick Kidd, that's focused on this question of how do we accelerate AI. Skill acquisition because if we don't give people the agency to participate in this reimagined future by having the skills they need, then they won't be able to participate to their full potential. So we've got to do all of this baseline uplift. And and by the way, there are countries in our region already doing that. So we've got to be careful we're not left behind. But we've also got to be saying all of our vet lecturers, all of our academics in universities, they need to be confident in the use of AI tools and confident in being able to pass on to students those skills. So they emerge from degree programs and vet courses ready for the workforce of the future. And that has to be comfort familiarity with AI. You've got to be AI literate and or AI fluent or AI competent. These are the new competencies and skills that people will need to operate. Because a lot of technical things are going to be done by AI. So you've got to have all of those human skills as well as all of those cognitive capabilities and that AI familiarity in order to be successful. One of the other dimensions that you think about reimagining the workforce of the future. When we did our study, we're interested in two other dimensions that I think are really important. One is a labour mobility dimension. And this this is a really interesting observation that some of the areas which are likely to be heavily impacted by AI and clerical and administrative tasks often fall into this category. Many of those are gender biased to women. And when you look at the labour mobility of women in those particular areas, they end up moving into occupations that are also susceptible to impact from AI. So when we think about these impacts on the labour market, we've got to be careful of gender implications as well as implications on First Nations and equity groups. But for women, it's quite an interesting challenge that we now have to provide an opportunity for people who are going to be dislocated in some way by AI and to make sure they have an opportunity to move into areas where they can upskill and reskill and have confidence in their future. So that labour mobility piece, I think, is really important about the workforce of the future. One of the other areas that gets mentioned a great deal in terms of disruption is entry-level jobs. And people worried that, in a way, agentic AI will be the entry-level graduate intern of the future. So what happens to entry-level jobs? So that's a very important point. We haven't seen that in Australia yet. We look very carefully at what happens with entry-level jobs. We're not seeing any particular impact in the Australian labour market, but there will be some. It's interesting in other places the US is seeing some impact on entry-level roles. When I talk to business leaders in various industry sectors about their AI journey, because many of them are not particularly AI competent or AI literate, but they understand it is a game changer potentially for their industry sector. And they're thinking about recruiting, you know, digital natives, those who are AI fluent, young people coming in entry-level, because they need the knowledge base those people bring to

Generative AI And Skills-First Hiring

Professor Glover 25:32

influence the way they will capture the benefits of an AI-infused future. So they see them as part of the upskilling of their own workforce and the introduction of new ideas and opportunities. So, in a way, that's enhancing the entry-level pathway for people who are who are AI literate. I've had some great examples of that in different industry sectors. So I think the AI dimension is a really important one that we all have to watch carefully. The government's released its national AI strategy, which is an important part of shaping the national narrative around artificial intelligence. The onus now is on a whole range of participants in our labour market and in our skills system and more broadly in the community to respond to that. And we need JSA to some extent and others to monitor the impact over time. Our report was a point-in-time analysis, but now we need to find out well how much of that is going to come to fruition and how quickly. And where we were a bit different in our analysis to some commentators and the media and tech gurus and others is we were predicting much more augmentation than automation. Yes. So our analysis said, well, yes, almost every job to some degree or other is going to be augmented by AI, but the job will still be there with a very important human dimension to it, but supplemented, complemented, and enhanced by AI. There'll be hybrid jobs that emerge because AI will allow you to create new ways of combining existing work together. And then, of course, you have an opportunity for new jobs to emerge. And we've we put out a report last year where we saw just on the horizon some emerging spikes of jobs in new areas. Again, great asset for young people thinking about interesting jobs in the future. And want to be a quantum computing technician. Not many of them. There'll be lots of them in the future. Um so there needs to be that you know, very, very careful analysis of augmentation versus automation. The big job losses we've seen in the tech and the finance industry are not surprising. In some cases, that that wasn't so much an AI reset as a really a reset from companies that have over-recruited in recent years. So that I think is a reset. Some of it's AI driven. So we'll see how that plays out in the next few years. But I have a very positive view of the reimagined workforce of the future because I do think we'll not just equilibrate to the benefits of artificial intelligence, but will also accommodate the human dimension to work in the future and the quality of work. It'll take away drudgery from some roles where some transactional, repetitive transactional work can disappear and people can then refocus on other interesting parts and particularly client and customer-centered aspects of the role. Interestingly, one of the challenges that people talk a bit about with AI is work intensity. Because if you think about the normal working day, you know, you have ebbs and flows, sometimes intensely busy, sometimes less so. If you take out the parts where you're not very busy, because AI will do that part of your work, and you move everything into the more intensive zone of activity, that will take its toll on people. So we need to accommodate changing ways in which people will work. And um one thing that we emphasized in our study was the importance of inclusive implementation of technology in the workplace. I think if we look at what works successfully, it is when workers and management are working together to design the implementation of a technology transformation. AI is just one example of it. So I think in in imagining the future, I'm reassured by many of the companies I'm talking to that they're very inclusive. And quite often it's because workers are already using AI and not telling you that's exactly right.

Kath Hume 29:45

They're the ones doing it. So best that we ask them. And I think it's that in work intensity is really important as well, because I think what I'm seeing is a lot of people talking about or hoping for productivity gains from AI, but not a lot of conversation around so what do we do with that time saved? And I think that's a really important thing that we should be discussing, and as you said, have a that human-centered design approach to be asking the people who are doing it, and you you also touched on a few things um aspirations. So, what would people like to be doing rather than what do organizations just want people to be doing? The skill adjacencies that you talked about, you know, declining professions, where might they be able to utilize those skills elsewhere? So I think all of the reports that you're talking about just give visibility to people. So is there's not that lack of hope or optimism that the world is changing around me and I'm helpless to do anything about it. I think it's a real enabler that you're giving them all of this information. Um, one of the things that you also mentioned around human skills, so I my background is learning and development and HR and economics, and I've sort of combined all of those, but learning and development, I really think that that learn of mobility is going to come about when people are have the capability to learn and we need to really build that skill of learning independently because we can't always rely on organisations to educate us, especially if we're looking at upskilling to move outside of an organization. But one of the things I'm really interested, and I'm not sure if you've how much thought you've put into this. So, my role as a strategic workforce planner is to go into an organization and and just for listeners, in case they're not aware, is to really look at what are the trends happening in the environment around the organization that we're thinking about over a say probably five to ten year period. So we can't predict, we've but we want to anticipate, so we've got some capability of adapting to that environment if and when it happens, but then putting plans in place to say, okay, there's multiple levers that we can move to prepare for this, and we can do it in a sustained fashion, and time is that we can do it incrementally. Um, what do you see for the role of the strategic workforce planner in ensuring that your data and reports and intelligence is utilized as it's intended to really complement the organization, but also the individuals and then the people we serve in those organizations?

Professor Glover 32:23

I look, I think it's a fascinating time for strategic planning. It's it's probably never been quite so challenging in a way. Um primarily because um if you look at aspects of the digital revolution of the last 30 years or so, the

Planning Horizons Shrink For AI

Professor Glover 32:41

ability to begin to scenario plan and and strategic plan what the future might look like, as much as you can determine it and then work back and start preparing for digital transformation. I suspect now with generative and and particularly with agentic AI, that's going to be even more challenging to predict in a way. So strategic planning is going to take on another edge of perhaps the time frames are being contracted a little bit.

Kath Hume 33:10

That's correct.

Professor Glover 33:11

And I think that's that's um probably a good thing because in Australia, if we want to be competitive, we want our businesses and industry to be competitive, and particularly if they want to be globally competitive, and the time frames are going to contract. They're going to need to be thinking not in the five-year horizon, but in a two to three-year horizon as they think about repositioning themselves for a in a different context. So the strategic planning aspects are really important part of it. I hope that our data is going to be of value. I'm sure people will appreciate the way it's been been put together. And of course, a lot of it is point-of-time data. So, apart from our big employment projections over the next five and ten years, which are looking out beyond the horizon, the rest of the data is really what's the trend been like, where are we at, what's emerging, and how do we provide some analysis and interpretation around that. Interestingly, though, we did recast our five and ten year employment projections as part of the generative AI study because we wanted to impose upon our model, our equilibrium model on the labour market, we wanted to impose upon it some additional assumptions around the depth and the breadth of AI uptake as a way of saying, well, what does that do to employment? Because we had all the work we'd done on augmentation and automation, and we could make assumptions about how slow or how rapidly industry would pick up AI and implement it and so on. So we did some longer-term forecasting on that. And that's, I think, something strategic planners should look at because it begins to show not so much an overall decline in employment levels, but it shows a different pattern of growth over time, particularly initially some flattening out and then some increase. So we see a different structure to the labour market growth in the five-year horizon to the 10-year horizon, but still we see growth. Now that's driven by some assumptions about augmentation and automation, so that needs to be reworked on a fairly regular basis, and governments will do that, and and I'm sure the Australian government will be doing it. But it does, I think, add another dimension to the planning horizon work about you know what do we need to be saying to businesses about what's likely to happen and how to prepare for it and and how to future-proof yourself to a certain extent. One of the things I often say to young people when they ask the question about what I should do to future-proof myself, I said, well, be AI literate, because that will help you enormously, and have an open mind to the opportunities, because there are many opportunities out there. But you walk walk into a job interview and that you're confident around AI and you understand hallucinations and you understand that managing an agentic AI system is to interpret and ensure that you have the capacity to ensure the outcomes and the output from that are actually fit for purpose. So there's a lot to be said for someone walking in future-proofing themselves, just as businesses need to take advantage of that data that we have, point in time, and some of the longer-term trend stuff to help in longer-term planning.

Kath Hume 36:29

Oh, there's so much richness in all of you have to say and all of those reports. I will send links to all of those and I'll include those in the show notes. You have touched on this already, but I do ask every guest, what does your reimagined workforce look like?

Reimagining Work With Balance And Inclusion

Professor Glover 36:46

As I said, I'm really positive about the future, despite some of the almost dystopian views you hear from people about robotics and AI and the future. I'm much more confident about the future than that. And so my reimagined workforce actually comes back to something Kathy, you said a little earlier, which was around productivity gain. When I talk to colleagues in the public service about AI, I refer them to a particularly telling graph that's in our AI study. And it shows hours worked mapped against salary increases in the professional areas of the economy over the last 20 years. And what it shows is hours worked going up steeply, salary increases nowhere near a steep. So one of the first things we need to capture with AI is around recapturing our life and our work-life balance. Because it is a great tool to help us to better manage our work when it's used appropriately. And I think the big copilot trial that was done by the Australian Public Service showed that yes, people could see how it could benefit them, whether they're policy makers in the general policy sense or whether they're more specialists, they could see how it can take away some of the challenges they face if they've got the capacity to manage it well and could be of huge benefit. So my first comment is let's get ourselves back equilibrated in life. I think when I reimagine the workforce of the future, I see a workforce where people have got that balance in their life. And I see a workforce which is much more inclusive. One of the things that we spend a lot of time looking at at JSA, and I shout at every opportunity, is the benefit of a diverse workforce. So we've done studies to look at the relationship between occupational shortages and gender segregation. So if you're in a gender segregated occupation, so male-dominated or female dominated, much more likely to be in shortage. If you have a balance of men and women in your workforce, you're less likely to have shortages. The same applies to an aged workforce. If you have a reasonable proportion of older workers, you're less likely to be in shortage. And that's 45 and above. And in fact, if you have a multi-generational workforce, you're less likely to be in shortage. The benefits of older workers working with younger workers is hugely important. If you have more First Nations employees, if you have more people with disability working in your organization, you're less likely to have shortages. The other important thing that we note is that occupational shortages, high levels of shortages, equate to low levels of productivity. So if we want to uplift productivity, let's make our workplaces more inclusive. So my reimagined workforce of the future is one where the balance is there in people's lives. And importantly, we have a very diverse and inclusive labour market. And by virtue of that, we are managing occupational shortages and we're driving up productivity in the national benefit. And of course, there's the dimension that that should bring around the quality of work and that people are paid appropriately for the quality in quality jobs because we want people, and this is something, again, AI can help us with in many, many ways. So I have a very positive view of a reimagined workforce. I also think people will engage with that labour market in very different ways. Absolutely. That's exciting. Sometimes they'll be a contractor, sometimes they'll be a part-time employee, sometimes they will be a full-time employee, and sometimes they'll be on a short-term contract and whatever. This is the nature of a dynamic workforce. We do need to see higher levels of labour mobility in Australia. We've seen that decline in recent years. People are not leaving one job and moving to another to advance their opportunities, to increase their salaries that we saw historically. We need to see more labour mobility because that's good for the economy. It brings more people into the economy and it's a wonderful opportunity. And I'd like to think the reimagined workforce is one where the barriers to participation are lowered considerably so people have an opportunity from a disadvantaged background to participate to their full potential and to see that much more prominently than we we see at the moment. And I think that's an aspiration everyone should share. But I see it in a very positive way, Kath.

Kath Hume 41:34

And it's so great that you're in the position you are because I think that optimistic future that you're painting that picture of is so appealing to me, and I'm sure it would be to others. But I think we need someone with that optimism to be leading this work because you can see that's at the foundations of everything that's being provided, it's all about how do we make the future better. So, on that note, thank you so, so much for setting aside the time. I know you're a very busy person and got very big responsibilities. So really appreciate that.

How To Contact JSA And Closing

Kath Hume 42:06

Could I ask if people wanted to contact you, is there a way that you would be happy for them to do so?

Professor Glover 42:12

Yes, Jobs and Skills Australia has a very straightforward public communications arrangement through our website so people can always get in touch. It's not hard to get in touch with me, it's barney.glover@ jobsandskills.gov.au. So very happy for people who have an interest in the labour market. We're about to go to public consultation on our next work plan. So if people have ideas about what they think we should prioritize under our act, um we've just been reviewed, and our act has just been reviewed in a very positive way for JSA. But our act requires us to go to public consultation on many, many things. So if people are interested, they should have a look at our website. It'll tell them how they can participate in our public consultation. And it's always valuable to have people from diverse parts of society tell us a little bit about their lived experience, the labour market and the skill system and their ideas for where we might focus our work in the future.

Kath Hume 43:09

What an incredible opportunity for all of us to actually shape the work plan. That's amazing. That's perfect timing, too. And I will include information about all of that in the show notes. So thank you so much, Professor Glover. It's been a pleasure.

Speaker 1 43:23

Thank you, Kathryn. Great talking to you, and good luck with number 51 after this.

Kath Hume 43:28

Thank you very much. Thanks for listening to the Reimagined Workforce Podcast. If you found the episode valuable, I'd encourage you to share it with your network and subscribe so you don't miss any further conversations. You can also find show notes and resources at www.workforce transformations.com.au slash podcast. If you're looking to take a more structured and practical approach to strategic workforce planning or capability development, you can connect with me on LinkedIn or Via the Workforce Transformations website. But for now, let's just enjoy reimagining the workforce together.