Capturing Skills Visibility in Your Industry Webinar Series - Episode 1 - Construction - Moving Beyond the Trade Shortage Illusion

In the first webinar of the series 'Capturing Skills Visibility in Your Industry' titled 'Construction - Moving Beyond the Trade Shortage Illusion', our presenters, Yasmin King and Dr. Mark Keough, showcased how to solve skilled tradespeople shortages by capturing and verifying the invisible 80% of skills gained through years of on-site experience.

Dr. Mark Keough presented a demonstration of the SkillsAware platform, where you can see how SkillsAware acts as a foundational infrastructure layer to translate real-world construction capability into auditable data, allowing you to deploy your workforce with precision and confidence.

👉 Watch the full video on https://skillsaware.com/events/webinar-series-capturing-skills-visibility-in-your-industry/

About SkillsAware

SkillsAware is an AI-powered skills recognition engine developed through a collaboration between SkillsIQ, a skills-focused not-for-profit and Edalex, an award-winning EdTech and SkillsTech company, building on decades of technology and skills expertise. Its SkillsTech platform and associated services captures and maintains an evidence-based indicator of the plethora of skills that individuals accumulate progressively.

SkillsAware enables organisations to identify the skills that exist within their workforce and highlight strengths and gaps so they can plan for the future. SkillsAware assists with skills-based hiring and resourcing and supports and contributes to productivity, performance, opportunity and reward goals. SkillsAware has relevance for individuals, small, medium and large enterprises and industries in the recognition of current capability, prior learning and experience.

Learn more on our website - https://skillsaware.com
Connect on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/skillsaware/
Connect on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/SkillsAware
Follow on YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/@Skills_Aware

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Thank you for tuning in to the Skills Aware podcast. We are a human-centred, AI-powered skills recognition engine transforming how people and organisations understand and grow their capabilities. Each episode features insightful conversations with industry leaders, experts, and innovators who share their knowledge, experiences and ideas on workforce skills, skills recognition, skills literacy, artificial intelligence, and so much more.

SPEAKER_05 0:36

And welcome everybody who has joined. Thank you for taking the time. Appreciate that in today's world where you have so many things happening, it's hard to find the time. I'd also just like to take the opportunity to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which we're meeting today. And while we're joining from all across the country, I pay my respect to elders past and present and extend that respect to any Aboriginal and Torres Trade Islander peoples with us today. I think it's really important as we come together to discuss skills and capability and opportunity that we recognise that this country holds the world's oldest continuing culture, and it's where skills and learning has always been built through lived experience, community, and practice. And I think that's an important point to remember. So thank you all for being here. I'd like to now welcome my colleague Mark Keogh, who's executive director and co-founder of Skills Aware. And as he said before, I'm Yasmin King, also a director and co-founder. And to start us off, we thought we might just play a short compilation of why we thought it was important to focus on construction today. Can I get hand over to you, Mark, to play that?

SPEAKER_02 2:02

So let's just see what other people are saying in the community about this. So let's see if this is right now.

SPEAKER_04 2:19

And we'd need each of these people to on the tools just to meet today's demand. Those numbers break down to around 22,000 more carpenters, 17,000 electricians, 12,000 plumbers, 4,500 bricklayers, and around 3,000 concretors. Without them, slabs don't get poured, frames don't get built, and bricks don't get laid.

SPEAKER_01 3:14

There's no doubt that the availability of skilled workers has been the biggest problem that the Queensland industry is facing.

SPEAKER_03 3:21

Construction Skills Queensland has done the maths. We're already about 15,000 workers short, but that's projected to rise to 35,000 in 2028.

SPEAKER_05 3:33

So that's some really, really uh stunning figures. Um and you even, if you add on the construct the Civil Contractors Federation who say that we're short, going to be short 330,000 workers in um within the next two years. So um, I mean the numbers are just extraordinary, aren't they, Mark?

SPEAKER_02 3:56

Yeah, absolutely. It's a you know what's fascinating about this though is it skills is one factor. There are other factors, of course, but there are many, many, many people who have the skills and if they could get recognized, could uh have become leaders in the field, could become supervisors, could, you know, be really making a contribution. So that's the space we're working in. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 4:18

Yeah. And I and I I'm sure that none of this is is is any uh um shock to those of you who are working in construction every day as you're trying to work out how the hell you're going to fuel your pipeline um with the workforce that you have. And I mean it's fair to say, Mark, the government is trying to respond in doing some things. And I think the budget saw some announcements, didn't it?

SPEAKER_02 4:42

Yeah, you know, it's very clear, isn't it, that um the government recognises the problem. Um uh the industry recognises the problem. The difficulty is um investment in the mechanics of change, and that's where we feel like there's there needs to be a greater contribution from the actual um training sector and also from innovation.

SPEAKER_05 5:01

Yeah. And I think it's that whole concept of, you know, there's certainly things happening from the top down in what government's trying to do, but we need to see some things happen from the bottom up as well. Um, and and I think that's where uh something like Skills Aware can play a role. Um I think the added challenge, and I know for those of you working in construction is that while the feds are saying cutting uh red tape, what I hear is uh from people in the sector is how many of the different states are actually putting more tape red tape in place. Um, for example, the design and construct registration in in New South Wales, some of the requirements for registration in Queensland, we've got the Building and Plumbing Commission happening in Victoria. So all of these is there's this incredible compliance complexity as well, as well as you're trying to find people to do the work and to do quality work. Because I think you know, the concept of just saying just quickly shorten training and make it easier, um, you're just basically delaying a problem because you know you still need quality. Um, and I think that's where we see you you can't compromise on just pushing a pipeline. You actually have to make sure that the pipeline shows evidence of people's capacity.

SPEAKER_02 6:25

Well, we all remember the horrible experience, don't we, of the of the the great boom in um you know, roof insulation and and how just the ex you know employing unskilled workers caused you know deaths and health issues and all sorts of things. So we don't want that. What we need to do is have an evidence-based approach to um to recognition, and that's the key. You know, it people are gonna be able to demonstrate that they can do the job, and then they need to be offered the job. And that's a whole pipeline question, which I'm not sure everyone's really focused on. Um people are doing making announcements about it, but the mechanics seem to be falling short.

SPEAKER_05 7:04

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Um, and so let's talk about how we think we can help um in addressing this this challenge, Mark.

SPEAKER_02 7:13

Yeah, yeah. So what and that some people will know um uh what Skills Aware does, and but one of the things we've done in our previous webinar series is we haven't actually shown it, so we're just gonna do that. Is now a good time for that? Shall we have a little look?

SPEAKER_01 7:26

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 7:26

Um yeah, good. All right, so let me just do a very, very fast walkthrough of uh Skills Aware. This is our new, and I've got to say, Skills Aware is new, it's a big idea, and um what we're what we're discovering is that there's a lot of market education required in order to understand skills and what they look like, um, and also to support people who might not be digitally literate at first attempt. But what we're discovering, and we've started pilots in the construction area, is we're discovering with a bit of coaching, a bit of support, um, people can use this tool and can uh accelerate their recognition either in an occupational recognition service type of arrangement, which most of the state governments now are looking at, um, or by uh just accelerating um uh specific skill recognition in specific competencies and skill sets, or indeed in traineeships and apprenticeships and so on. So this is applicable in all of those sort of domains. So, what I'm going to show you first is how we onboard people and what we've got is a customizable sort of tell us it tell us about yourself to start with and upload any evidence you've got, job description, previous work history, performance uh histories, uh skill sets that you've been uh or skill records that you've got from from uh uh compliance, um, training courses you've attended, anything that's got a textual representation of uh evidence of skill we'll do. And not too far away, we that that will include videos and video transcripts. So we're working on that in the background right now. Um then we ask about your general skills, what you're good at, and all of this gets fed into an AI um agent, and the AI agent uses this onboarding information to then start, and I'll just submit that and get to the dashboard. And uh the onboard uh the uh AI agent uses that that uh information to suggest a bunch of skills. Now, the skills we're looking at here are the Australian competencies, all 15,000 of them in our database, and all of the ones from the construction industry are all there. You can see the codes, which many would be be familiar with. You've got suggested skills, you can hide them. There's about a hundred suggested skills here that I can choose. Construct roof gardens. Well, I haven't done any of that. So this is Mick Russo, who's a brickie. Uh this is a made-up persona, but we decided to to pick on uh on Mick. He's a builder's labourer, bit of a brickie, but never got qualifications, works in in uh in bricklaying. And so uh uh Mick and and his coach, who's helping him through this process, engage in a chat with an AI bot and is asked questions, encouraged to load more evidence, and evidence is recognized in three important forms. And this is the important new one, self-claimed evidence. I have done this, I've done this for years, but no one's ever recognised that I can do it. Second one is organizational evidence where I have done this and my and my organization has evidence that I've done it. And the third one is certified evidence where you may have formal qualifications from other other activities in your life. Once we get beyond suggested skills, you add using the add thing to your shopping cart, which is the my skills area. Now, this is your portfolio of skills. We are starting to build a portfolio in order to get RPL or get recognition. Now, you'll see in this portfolio we've got um this uh I'm gonna work with this construct brick blocks, brick and block structures and features. And what I've done, uh what Mick has done is he's um responded to all this, he's loaded a lot of evidence, and can you see here there's an experience score and a formal score? Now, Nick has no formal experience, but he's got 46 out of 50 for informal experience and self-claims, and that's a very high score. Now, this is not an assessment. What it is is the probability that the evidence Mick has provided is um is sufficient for assessment for um RPL, and that's designed to guide an assessor. When you have all of this, what you can do is a number of things. One of the neat things is you can seek an endorsement using encrypted email from a previous supervisor or a previous peer or someone who's got some evidence that they can share, and you send that message off to an endorser, and they can send through an endorsement, and that just adds to the evidence. Very powerful uh new feature we've got in the system. And then the the the last thing we'll do is I'll I'll show is just how you view how an assessor would view this. So when you view the skill package, this looks like a certificate, it's really just a certificate of evidence, it's not a certificate of of um completion, but uh it's got all the details you need for an assessor to look at. It shows every element of the skill, it shows the skill definition, it shows where the score has come from, where the evidence has come from, it's got links to each artifact of evidence, and above up here, it's a URL. So you can copy the URL, share it with an assessor in a report, and um and then the assessor can work with you to get RPL. Um the other thing I'll just show, because I haven't shown it, is the evidence hub. At any time you can add more evidence, and the AI um uh mapping will look at the evidence and map it to um whether it's organizational or self-claimed or certified evidence, and uh and then allow you to, you'll see this here, go down here, it'll allow you to update your score because you've added more evidence, and I can go and look and update my score and press the update button and it will increase my score. I reckon that's enough to show for now. Um Yasmin, that's the fastest demo I've ever done, but at least it's an orientation for those who haven't seen Skills Aware uh as yet. So uh we're having we're having some lovely experiences with pilot projects at the moment, and uh people having real real positive uh experiences of recognition. And uh maybe you could talk a bit about that.

SPEAKER_05 13:30

Yeah, I mean I think that I mean one of the things that I think organisations underestimate is how actually making somebody feel that their skills are visible is actually something that can help with retention because people feel recognised and uh and valued uh because of it. And I think one of the other uh things that's been very interesting is where a lot of organisations do a lot of internal training, often because it's sort of just done from their perspective, people just think I'm being made to do this, but because it's not being externally validated for them, they don't actually see the value of it. Um, and this can actually really help with having those skills that you're learning on the job and doing with compliance training actually recognised. Um, and it's also an ability for somebody to have an ongoing um record of. I mean, we talk about lifelong learning and then we don't actually encourage people to keep um keep records of everything they do. I mean, if somebody were to ask me all the corporate training I've done in my career, could I provide evidence of it? Um, you know, because it was never you know thought about, um, you know, I I would struggle. Uh so I think encouraging people to to think about that in a positive way, that it's about demonstrating their skills is a really good outcome for um being able to recognize what people can do.

SPEAKER_02 15:00

Yeah, absolutely. And and the experience we're seeing, I think, is that people are um either they have a lot of evidence. People are all everyone's different. Either they've got a lot of evidence, or they've got evidence they don't know they have. And so that's where the humans in the loop are so important. Uh we're finding having somebody who's available for a bit of upfront support and coaching at the early part of the process, and then an assessor available later. But what what we are finding is the extraordinary time saving in in this process, not just the outcomes, but the time saving in the process. In other words, gathering the evidence and and doing it uh and and then getting um it mapped against the competencies, what used to take um weeks and months, people are doing in hours. Isn't that right?

SPEAKER_05 15:46

Yeah, absolutely. We've and and and not only that, I think it's helping assessors in that they can say, look, you know, if you've got no formal evidence and you're only going to be using um organisational or self-claimed evidence, come to us when your number reaches whatever they determined. So instead of this toing and throwing, oh, you haven't got enough, you haven't got enough, you haven't got enough, you've got to come back with more. Um, and obviously the system also can somebody can actually ask, how do I improve my score? And it will give guidance. It won't do it for you, but it will give guidance of what sort of things you can go and and seek to improve your score. It's also worth mentioning that you can talk to the AI agent as opposed to type. So so it it uh um for somebody who's not comfortable with with inputting data, they can do that. And the other benefit is that it can do it in multiple languages. Um I mean the out output's always English, but you can can if you you need to converse in different languages, so which I think is also good, particularly in this industry where you've got a lot of people who might be from migrant backgrounds and and English is not their first language.

SPEAKER_02 17:01

Yeah, it's very interesting. Now I'm gonna ask you the really hard question. What do you think ASCA thinks about this?

SPEAKER_05 17:08

Well, we know in one of our pilots that um uh they have actually seen the process. I think the fundamental thing that needs to be made clear is that this does not make decisions. The decision is made by the assessor, but it helps the assessor in that it does that administrative mapping very fast. Um, and it also very clearly articulates why it's made the probability assessments that it has. And so that assessor can see that in quite quite granular detail and say, hmm, I want to have a bit more look at this, or there's clearly a gap here, and this is where somebody needs to have additional training, etc. Um The other thing we found in one of our pilots is that people who thought that it would be a lay-down Mazair because of their experience that they would get RPL straight away actually were able to clearly see themselves that they actually didn't have sufficient and that they needed to do more. Um, and that's been an unintended benefit that that we've heard from from uh assessors in the process that they didn't expect.

SPEAKER_02 18:27

Yeah, I think it's uh it's a really good point you're making. And the other one that that is the big, you know, difficult one in this world is is the is the evidence legitimate? You know, is it is it fraudulent? But what what what we know is that no one can prove that. Like, but what we can do, like with the endorsement um button and the endorsement system, is we can encrypt some things and we can make them more likely to be um uh able to be validated or verified. Um but you still have to, the, the, the assessors, assessing organization still has to have policies in place that will uh weed out people who are who are not um not um uh uh uh uh taking a legitimate approach uh to getting recognition. So yeah, it's not possible. It would be a terrible thing if we had an AI assessment, AI evidence manager that was telling people you you're being fraudulent because they they could get that wrong, you know. And we and we don't want that. We need the human in the loop. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 19:25

Yeah, absolutely. And I think what I see is a great opportunity is actually for the skills of assessors to actually be focused on the things they should be and not on administrative process, which is is a large part of why people don't like doing RPL. Um Ron's got a quite good question here. He's saying, given the budget and funding allocations for trades recognition Australia to overhaul how migrant and overseas trained trade skills are assessed and licensed in Australia, what do we think about this?

SPEAKER_02 19:57

Well, I think it's a great initiative. Uh the difficulty is that the government has a tendency to fund peak bodies rather than peak projects. And so, you know, often uh very large amounts of funding gets dissipated as organizations like TradeRec in Australia try to herd all the cats in the vet system, you know, there's a lot of people, there's a lot of people to get organized. So, of course, we'll be in touch with those people and trying to make sure they're aware of the service we're offering. We've decided to do this as a private service, right? So you could you could argue that a government organization could provide a service like Skills Aware. But if that happened, um the way Australia operates, you know, it would be all the normal interstate jealousies would apply and so on. So what we've decided to do is just be in the marketplace. And we hope that people like Trade Recognition Recognition Australia look at all the great work we're doing and uh and we can work with them or with people that they choose to fund uh to do the acceleration work. So we're very active in uh engaging with those people and uh let's hope that um we can make a difference. You know, there's a there's a certain, I mean, we're a commercial organization, but we're all very experienced. We've been around this a long time, and um someone said to me, you know, how courageous of you guys to just say we've got to do something, you know, and um and I'm not sure if we're courageous or what, but um and you're always worried when people say you're courageous, but uh that you might actually just be being foolish. But the truth is change needs to happen, and sometimes it can only happen from the bottom up, you know, it money can come from the top down, but the real change needs to come from the bottom up.

SPEAKER_05 21:38

Yeah, yeah. And having been involved in in uh a couple of tech startups in my life, I know that you can have the best product in the world, but if people don't want to use it, um don't engage with it, it it won't work. And uh and I I think having the fact that we've made this from it it's the individual who owns the data. And it's from their perspective, um, is a really critical differentiator because that incentivizes the individual to engage, right? Because there's something in it for them, right? Um, and you know, and I I often use the example of, you know, I look at what we've done, for example, with health records. People don't see that as their health record, they see it as the government's health record or doctor's health record, not theirs. And I think that's why it's had, you know, a challenging engagement.

SPEAKER_02 22:32

You know, um, we've we use the metaphor, the excellent metaphor, I think you thought of it, um, of that when you start to form your skills portfolio, it's like a shopping cart. And in many ways, skills are a tradable entity. And um, my research says that most of us have seven, eight hundred, a thousand skills. You can never write them on a resume, but you can recognize them and identify them in a database and a portfolio. And so that's our aim is to help everybody recognize the breadth of their skills. Um, and um, yeah, Ron, in some ways it's a currency. They're actually going down that pathway in the United States, the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation, and uh there's new federal legislation in the United States where they're recognising skills as a tradable currency and dealing with it that way. In other words, funding comes um associated with it as a commodity, and um that's a fascinating approach. Um, it's got its pluses and its minuses, but um, but that's worth investigating if any of you are interested in looking at that. That's the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation and uh recent legislation um that's come before the House of Representatives in the US around skills currencies. Um, whether that's the best approach for Australia, I'm not so sure. But um the the the there's certainly merit in getting to the grassroots and working with individuals that's what we're doing. We're working with individual builders' labourers and trying to help them, you know.

SPEAKER_05 23:57

Yeah. Um, and Michelle's got a question here in light of encouraging lifelong learning. Who pays for the seat for the RPL candidate if they want to keep uploading to their portfolio for further upskilling? Can they take ownership of it and perhaps move it to another RTO? Mark, do you want to answer that?

SPEAKER_02 24:15

Yeah, well, that's our vision, but unfortunately the Australian system is not structured that way. Um there is a sort certain expectation that the government pays for training or subsidizes training. And so who pays is always tricky. But you know, the individuals are paying. What we would say is that let's just say you've got to pay $3,000 to get RPL for a certificate three in something, in let's say in Carpentry. Um that $3,000 is going to the administrative cost of doing that. So what we're looking to do is reduce that administrative cost and make it cheaper for everybody, make it still profitable and okay for the RTO, make it cheaper for the individual, and make it cheaper for the economy. That's our goal, really directly. So who pays is is critical, but someone's got to pay for effort, human effort. So there's no doubt about that. What we're trying to do is get governments to be a bit more enlightened about the importance that the money gets to the grassroots. It doesn't get sucked up in bureaucracies.

SPEAKER_05 25:17

Yeah. I think the other part though, in in in answer to your question, Michelle, is that ultimately see that it will get sponsored by, you know, through an RPL process or through an employer doing it, but then it will be the individual who then chooses to maintain their portfolio and own it and and and so they'll pay a subscription like a Netflix subscription to keep it. That's our ultimate goal. Um, and that they will then continually update it through their life and through whatever jobs and whatever on-the-job training or volunteering or whatever they do so that they can continually, and I think it's going to become a critically important in a world where, I mean, you know, the the concept of a traditional career path is really dissipating, right? I mean, you know, people will be a portfolio of skills which they will then need to package up to determine what sort of jobs and roles they're doing.

SPEAKER_02 26:19

Yeah, I and the tricky thing is, as we know, we've all heard employers say, if I train them, I don't want to train them to leave, right? But that attitude has to change. And that that changing attitude's got to come from the top down. Uh someone's got to have the courage and senior political and bureaucratic leadership to say, look, if we're going to invest in training, it needs to be for the community and the economy, you know, not just not just um uh in that kind of pernicious manner of like, well, if I spend money on training my people, they're just gonna leave me. Well, if they're leaving you, it's not because you spent money on the training, it's probably for some other reason. But uh nonetheless, um, we've got to get that out of the marketplace. That's not helpful to anyone.

SPEAKER_05 26:59

Yeah. Well, I I think also that you know we we do actually spend a lot on training. I mean, uh if you if you look at um uh how much money is spent across the Australian economy, it's it's significant. I think, and we're one of the highest um uh countries spending on training, but yet we have one of the lowest productivities. So something we're doing is not working, right? So we need to do things differently, um, or else, you know, it's what is it, the definition of insanity, keep doing the same thing, over and over and over again. Over and again, you don't get a different outcome.

SPEAKER_02 27:38

Well, it's been great today, and this will be available. I know some attendees uh will look for this uh podcast as a link, and there are a couple of people who registered who couldn't attend, so we're going to um make sure they get the link. This will be available, it's on our website. We're creating a whole series of um of uh of uh webcasts for uh for ongoing support for the industry.

SPEAKER_05 28:01

And hopefully, and then if anybody would like to reach out for more specific information, you know, Mark and I are always very happy to to um assist and you know give you um a more detailed um uh look. Uh but I mean we really think that in order to do something different, we're gonna have to um start looking at taking more innovative approaches, and certainly we hope that we're gonna be part of that.

SPEAKER_02 28:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 28:28

So thank you for your time. Really?

SPEAKER_02 28:30

Thanks for coming. Thanks, Yazi.

SPEAKER_05 28:32

Mark and um uh have a great afternoon, everybody. Bye.

SPEAKER_00 28:43

Thanks for tuning in to this Skills Aware podcast episode. Don't forget to follow us on your podcast app so you don't miss a thing, and be sure to visit our website at skillsaware.com to learn more.