Capturing Skills Visibility in Your Industry Webinar Series - Episode 3 - Migrants - Solving the Gatekeeper Blind Spot

In the third webinar of the series 'Capturing Skills Visibility in Your Industry' titled 'Migrants - Solving the Gatekeeper Blind Spot', our presenters, Yasmin King and Professor Lucy Taksa, discussed how to improve real-world skills visibility and unlock internationally skilled talent for Australian employers. 

Margo Griffith presented a demo of the SkillsAware platform, showing how SkillsAware translates global experience into a portable and auditable Skills IQ.

👉 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
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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_03 0:34

Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the lands on which we're all meeting today. While we're joining from across the country and internationally, I'd like to pay my respects to elders, past and present, and extend that respect to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders peoples with us today. And as we come together to discuss skills, capability, and opportunity, I think it's important to recognise that this country holds the world's oldest continuing culture where skills and learnings have always been built through lived experience, community, and practice. Hi everybody, I'm Yasmin King. I'm a director and co-founder of Skills Aware, and I'm joined by Professor Lucy Tasker of Deakin University and Margot Griffith, my colleague from Skills Aware. Thanks for joining us today. I want to talk initially with you, Lucy, if I can. And I should say we met what over 10 years ago when we sat on the Multicultural Committee for the New South Wales Government and we talked about the very same challenges that we're going to talk today for migrants struggling to get recognition of their skills and past experience and professions. And I know you've been working on this for much longer. Do you want to add to that history?

SPEAKER_02 2:05

I I will add to that history. Thank you very much, Yasmin, for inviting me along. And I acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians as well. Look, sadly, I don't think that the structural barriers we discussed in 2012 and 2013 on that ministerial round table have been addressed. Indeed, I don't think they've been addressed since they were first raised in a number of landmark inquiries in the 1970s and 1980s. So we're talking 50 and 40 years ago. And you might recall that that committee reviewed the recommendations from various inquiries. The federal government's review of post-arrival programs and services for migrants in 1978, would you believe, known as the Galberry Report? Another federal inquiry in 1982 by Frye. And finally, the one that I'd really like to focus on today is the recognition of overseas qualifications inquiry that was actually established by the then premier Nick Greiner in 1989, also done by Frye, which led the Premier to treat recognition, qualifications recognition as an industrial issue. And basically, he introduced bridging courses as well. They began in 1990, and an overseas qualifications unit. It was the first one in Australia and subsequently it was modeled on by other states and territories. And the board itself was an independent statutory body reporting directly to the minister, and it brought together policy and industrial relations knowledge of the migrant employment unit, which was in the Department of Industrial Relations, as well as the Information and Advisory Section of the Overseas Qualification Unit, which was interestingly in ethnic affairs in the Ethnic Affairs Commission. So the important thing I want to stress here is that in 1990, this was not simply about recognizing, assessing, and so on overseas qualifications, but also ensuring that they would be equitable by recognizing experience and skills. So the board's functions were really this holistic framing that I've just mentioned, and to also assist in the promotion, development, and coordination of information. And note here counseling services, refresher and bridging courses, training, retraining, and employment programs for migrants. In its time, and it was closed down in 2004, the board provided direct information and counseling to more than 20,000 migrants. It negotiated and in some cases funded bridging and refresher programs for a range of professions, including nurses, teachers, engineers, doctors, and dentists, and so on. The specialist migrant placement officer program and the mature workers program were really quite critical. And I think the others here won't know this, but you will no doubt remember that one of the things that a number of the migrant representative groups told us in that committee in 2013 was that there needed to be something to get over the blockages around the lack of experience in the Australian workplace and the lack of recognition of experience, cross-border experience. And we were talking then about shadowing opportunities, internship opportunities, and so on to create pathways to experience. I'm sorry, I'm using um artifacts here because I'm very jet-lagged. Now I'm of the view that this multifaceted approach to recognition of overseas qualifications, skills, and experience, and then assess assistance with placement programs is really important. And their demise, I think, contributes to the continuation, perhaps even the institutionalization of barriers that effectively prevent the harnessing of migrants' human, cultural, social capital, the underutilization of their skills, and the economic and social, and most importantly, the mental costs of this loss for migrants.

SPEAKER_03 7:26

Yeah. I mean, the recent study that Deloitte Access Economics did for SSI highlighted that, you know, we've got 620,000 permanent migrants. So these are people who are already here in Australia, all working below their skill level. Um, and that that's costing the economy about 70 billion over the last 10 years. I mean, that's massive numbers. And then in the same breath, we talk of an oh, why is our productivity so low? Um, and I I I mean, I know just anecdotally the number of times I talk to um people in, you know, driving Ubers or, you know, being you know, working in in a service role. Um, I mean, I recently went to a restaurant where the the guy who was a Ukrainian who was here served me and he was a nuclear physicist. Um you know, um, and I have to say, I I just think this is so much wasted expertise and this notion um that you know um if you haven't done it in Australia, you can't possibly have any relevant expertise, I just think is just so um naive and uh you know means we have so many people whose opportunities are are being lost. Um I mean, I wanted to talk in particular about um the qualification process, obviously, because that's where our interest is. Um I mean uh do you think part of the challenge is that compared to what what existed in the the late 90s is that it's incredibly fragmented, right? I mean, if you've come here as a migrant in a particular discipline and you want to work out what you need to do to work in that discipline, to actually navigate um where and what you need to do is incredibly complex, right? I mean, because it's different organizations that are responsible for. I mean, you've got to you and we double, we double cost people, don't we? Because, you know, you pay to become a migrant to get into Australia and to get all of your details and evidence recognized to get the entry in. And then we expect you to do it all again to get your qualifications recognized. And we're talking, you know, not hundreds of dollars, we're talking thousands and thousands of dollars that these people have as a barrier to them.

SPEAKER_02 10:14

Well, yeah, and and there's also the the double costing in terms of retraining because the qualifications and experience aren't recognized. Uh, like you, I quote this particular example because it was so salient to me, an Uber driver from Jordan, uh, qualifications in pharmacy, decades um in um pharmaceutical multinationals in Jordan, and arrived, and his qualifications to get his qualifications recognized was very expensive in the first place, but in the end, he went to TAFE and did a chef's course in order to get something. So we're talking about not only the costs you mentioned, but also the costs, uh, these additional costs that I mentioned as well. And I think this goes down to a lack of long-term thinking strategy and investment, really. It's short-term gain for long-term cost and quick fixes and focus on marketing and outsourcing strategies that suggest that initiatives are being introduced without recognizing the need for a holistic and joined up uh approach to portfolios, particularly ministerial portfolios, but just generally, there's such a siloed approach. Um, I mean, I find it astounding that qualifications recognition federally is in education. Um, and you know, qualifications recognition, in my view, is a very blunt instrument. I know I've done it in universities. Um we only focus on the limited qualifications. Uh and we don't recognize, well, some of us do, but on the whole, the there's a lack of recognition of the biases involved in that qualifications process. And I think what you know, what I mentioned before about the Griner uh initiative was that this is not just an educational issue. Um, it's a multicultural issue, it's a social issue, it's an economic issue. Um and I think the New South Wales Ethnic Affairs Commission um did a report, the landmark participation report, which goes to a whole range of things. In 1978, they came up with 280 recommendations that have all been basically forgotten, including, and I really like the language that they used in this report, about the rec the need to recognize the polyethnic nature of the public and more specifically the polyethnic nature of the workforce. That is about intercultural communication. And, you know, it's assumed often that English-speaking people are not ethnic, you know, but in fact, the intercultural communication issues are across all of them. And it's worthwhile noting that the Ethnic Affairs Commission's aim was to find solutions to the problems faced by migrant workers in the places where they worked, yeah, and to engage with a range of stakeholders, um, employers, unions, and the like. And what they did was they said, look, there's a need for English language training pertinent to work. And they recommended at the time, this is the language of the time, industrial language training unit be established within the Department of Labor and Industry in order to develop a capacity for liaison with the key stakeholders, a bit like the old notion that uh the Hawke government introduced around an accord, you know, bring all the players together. Um and the point here was that everything needed to be focused on the workplace, not just generally. Um, and I'll say something in a minute about the English language classes. But what we don't have is this joined up thinking. Um, to deal with the fragmentation that you mentioned, um, I think there's a necessity for that joined up thinking in order to be able to map across skills, experience, and qualifications.

SPEAKER_03 14:55

Yeah. I mean, I it seems to me that part of the challenge is that um there is a complete lack of trust of something that hasn't been either, you know, if you haven't had direct experience in your profession in Australia, or you have a qualification from somewhere else, that it's a mystery, right? Um, and that you know, you can't rely on it. And it and it's why so many people get driven to, you know, go and do another qualification again. And let's not even talk about the massive opportunity cost, let alone the financial cost of doing that. Um, and also the inequity of someone who's, you know, you know, uh, you know, being the head physiotherapist in an emergency hospital in Afghanistan, being told to get recognized here, sorry, you're gonna effectively have to go and do a physiotherapy um course again, and you know, you you're gonna have to meet the same sort of you know, test barriers to get in. I mean, it it really is quite mind-blowing. So I think we sort of in in in coming together with what we've tried to do, what we are hoping is that in basically being able to give that invisible, like I don't trust it, some really structured visibility, that it will then at least mean that some of what people have, if not all, can be recognizing rather than this force, sorry, you've got to start again from a base of zero. Um and and I think I mean that that visibility issue and trust issue is I think one of the challenges that we need to address. And and look, I mean, and and I get that in employment, you know, we we find even in Australia, people go, well, if you haven't done it in exactly the same sort of company as mine, in exactly the same sort of way, I don't have trust in what you can do. And then I think, well, doesn't that also impact on innovation? Because, you know, somebody from the outside can uh um who has done something somewhere else can bring different perspectives, um, and and it's actually enriching, not detracting, um, if you think of it in that way. Do you agree?

SPEAKER_02 17:30

I do I do agree, and I think the the lack of trust is tied to what I call deficit thinking rather than asset perspectives. Um and I think it's sort of really related to how we view proficiency, particularly in English language, right? Um you know, I think this is a really critical issue. Most employers say, uh, your English isn't up to scratch. Um, so I don't trust you in the first place. Um and look, I I I think there's all sorts of other issues here, but I I would like to say something about this because it's dear to my heart. Um I think there's been a marked failure through the outsourcing outsourcing of English language training and the very generalist approach to English, which goes to communication issues between employees, potential employees and employers, as well as governments and government agencies and so on and so forth. Um I did a study with uh two economists uh in 2019, 2018-2019, and we reviewed the building a new life in Australia, B and L A for short, longitudinal survey of humanitarian migrants and their settlement in Australia. And it was basically conducted annually from 2013 to 2018, and then there was a higher edis, and it's gone back, you know, since 2022. But we only looked at the data from the earlier part. And basically, what I was really interested in, and what we published on at the time was on human capital inverted commas, which uh basically I was really interested in their views of the English language training they got. Um and most of them said that it was not fit for purpose, okay, even though they thought TAFE was better than some of the private providers and so on, because it did not deal with the the fitting for the workplace needs of communication. Um and I think, you know, um just you were saying before that I've been doing this for a while. Well, you know, I did a bit of research on uh what David Hill did with the State Rail Authority when he was the CEO in the um early 1980s, and there were big issues around these sorts of um concerns, then, particularly about the migrant workforce in the railways. And um what he did was he instituted English language classes in the workplace during work time, which then basically had a huge impact on women. Uh I mean, just as an aside, you know, I know that migrants are so exhausted by the work they do and now reinforced by gig work, okay, um, that they just don't have the energy to go to classes to improve their communication. So they're even more locked in. Um and, you know, I think we we should really learn from some of those things that uh they were doing. And I might point out that in the landmark participation report of 78, um basically they also looked at the needs of immigrant women, and they argued that the adult migrant education service English language programs had to be made more flexible in subject matter, teaching methods, times, venues, childminding arrangements, and the like, yeah, and wholly um offered in in um uh in the time of the employing body. Um so I I just want to end off by saying something uh else about that um deficit thinking. Okay. Uh to my mind, the linguistic capital of migrants is really, really um taken into Account. Now you know, and I know that in Europe most people speak at least two languages, at least, right? And the productivity and trust benefits that come with that are huge. Here we only talk about the lack of English proficiency. We do not recognize that most of these migrants have multiple languages. Multiple languages. Multiple languages. And that also gives them what is known as navigational capital, not just linguistic capital, because they've learned through the migration process anyway to navigate institutions, systems, and so on. And yet in Australia they keep coming up against barriers. I think that that we have to get over this one instrument.

SPEAKER_03 22:56

Yeah. And it's not even a direct, it's not even direct in that, you know, if somebody is a migrant and comes, so for example, in the health system, if if if you come via the NHS, right, and you might be of a non-English speaking background, when you come through from the NHS into Australia, English language proficiency is irrelevant because you're coming from the UK. So we don't need to existence. So I look, I'm I'm going to ask you, um uh Lucy, if you mind just hanging on, because we've got um some people who might ask some questions, but I just want to move quickly to getting Margot to just give a I think what we've tried to do to address what we think is this trust and visibility gap of people's skills as a starting point, and that will enable individuals to actually do this initially. And if you think about um, if you want to get your skills recognized here as a migrant, before you do anything, before you know whether there's any possibility, whatever um uh process you're gonna follow, there's immediately an upfront cost, right? Um, and that can be in the thousands. So you don't even know if you're gonna get a get you're going to be successful or what you're gonna be successful in. And there's so there's barriers from the get-go. And at least pursuing something like this would give people an indication against an Australian standard of what they have that might be able to be recognized. So over to you, Margot.

SPEAKER_01 24:33

Thank you, Yasmin. And look, Lucy, thank you so much for for all of um your you know incredible experience and insights. And it it just strikes me that you know everything old is new again, right? It's like we have so much learnings from the past that we're not leveraging and putting action to. And one of the questions I I would love to circle back to when we're when I'm done showing you through this is why are we not aggressively pursuing this? Like what is that barrier? Um, because I you hear over and over again in in the media that this is a critical issue from a productivity perspective, and yet there's very little actionable actions, to be honest. So let's circle back to that. Um, as Jasmine indicated, um, and thank you, Yaz, um, we've been sort of looking at this problem and seeing what we could do to tackle the skills visibility issue, right? As a first step, we're not going to solve the systemic issue that is much wider and broader. But from an individual perspective, what could it look like if we actually understood and could tell the story of what we know and can do? What would that look like from the get-go? Um, and so we, this has been a wicked problem for a long time, but it's really only been, I guess, AI coming into mainstream and and being accessible um to the general public and to to us as developers in a more cost-effective, meaningful way that we could really look at tackling this. Because it's a lot of data that sits behind this, um, and a lot of mapping. Um, and in human hours, that was not tenable. But with AI, we can absolutely do that. Um, so we are looking at a productivity piece. So, what would it look like if we could take your lived experience, um, your uh your informal, your formal, and your non-formal learning, what would that look like if we could map it against some of the standards that in Australia we we hold from an education and qualifications perspective? So we've started out with the national training packages, but we can really look at any kind of database. And Skills Aware is pretty simple. We invite you to interact with an AI, um, a gentic AI chatbot. Uh, we map it against the database that we're using. In this case, it is the national training package data, and then we give you an output. And that output can be for an individual, a digital credential that shows you um what your skills are. And if we're talking about an organization, then we can give you a report of what that looks like to feed into your systems. So, you know, we've intentionally kept this very um configurable both at the front end and also in the output. So I'm going to quickly um just take you through this. Can I just check that you're hearing me okay and that there's no lag? We're good? Okay. We good. All right. When you're coming to Skills Aware, one of the things that we encourage up front is to gather as much information to stop that back and forth with the chat, which gets very old very quickly, right? So what you would be invited to do, and I haven't gone into this initially, is a profile where we can configure the kind of questions and kind of information that you would want to gather up front. Um, and what we can do there is also encourage you to start thinking about what kind of evidence you have. Um, and all of this feeds into um your conversation with the AI chatbot. And now, this is um, as you can see here, um uh this is a profile that we have made up of uh a migrant coming in who has an accounting background. Um, now they don't have their degree qualifications available to them, so that is not in this. Um, they haven't ingested that, but what they've done is ingested a lot of their self-assertions um and a lot of their workplace endorsements. Um, what we've got here is welcome to Skills Aware. Um, what industry do you work in? Accounting, what's your current job, retail manager? And so it goes on. I won't read this all to you, but the AI then interacts with you to start saying, well, let's let's gather some evidence here. As the evidence gets put in, on the right hand side here, you can see it's starting to suggest some skills that might align to you. Now it's up to you as the individual to go, hmm, some of these are relevant, some of these are not relevant. Um, remember, we are going against the 73,000 skills that are in the Australian training packages. So we're we're mapping against a very big database. Um, we can narrow that down if we need to, but so the AI is going, hey, here's some things that might be applicable to you. And it's up to you to go, hey, yes, I can see that this applies to me. Um, you can see the details of any particular um skill that it shows that it it has identified by clicking on that. These are the key elements. Now, what I won't do is hit that plus button because once I hit that plus button, the AI starts to analyze your evidence against that skill, and that does take a while. What I'm going to do is jump over here to my skills because these are skills that I've already identified. And you can see here there's a bunch of them that actually relate to my accounting background or this individual's accounting background. Um of them I've been adding evidence again. You can see here it says update available. Um, and let's click on that one. Based on new evidence you have provided, an update is available. Um, so that's great. You can keep on to continuously updating your evidence against these um skill profiles. Um, you can see here that because we don't have any formal qualification documents, it's only an experience score. But this experience score is 29 out of 50, which is pretty good actually. But if you want to get better at this, like if you want to actually add some more um evidence, we have the ability to either check your progress, which we look at all of the individual elements. And you can see here they're not bad, but this one's not great. So that is one of the elements where you go, I actually need to go out and seek some more evidence for that one. And you can do that either by clicking on improve your score, and it will give you indications of how you can do that. And one of the ways that you can improve your score is to click get endorsement. Now, this is an encrypted and secure link that you can go out to your uh work supervisors, um, your colleagues, your peers, anyone who can endorse your skill. And you can see here you can manage that process. Now that's encrypted within Skills Aware. Let me go back here. Um I won't create. So once you've gone through and you're gathering all of your evidence, um the next step to that, if you've gone, okay, I'm completely, I've got all the evidence I possibly can. Um then what we can do is package up that skill, which means that it then becomes um an artifact for you to be able to share, to copy a URL. Um perhaps you're wanting to get it assessed for recognition prior learning, so then it can be sent on to an assessing body. I'm gonna click on one that has already been packaged. Um, and you can see here it's still got all of the information here, but there's view my skill package. If I click on that, it's going to come back with this certificate. Um, so you can see Amon, um, apply and maintain knowledge of financial products and services. Um and here's all of the information along with all of the evidence, and this can be shared either in a printed copy or you can copy the URL. And soon we will also have um a dashboard so that if this was within an organization, an assessor could see that. I'm conscious that we're at time, so I'm going to stop sharing. That was a very quick overview of what we can do, and would love to hear from you if you think this is going to be useful in any way for your organization. Um yeah, over to you, yes. You're on mute. You're on mute.

SPEAKER_03 33:46

Sorry about that. Um look, I think you know, we uh we we are um over time, but I mean let's circle back to Lucy and actually see whether she's got some thoughts on answering your end question. And as Margot said, if you're interested in in learning more about what we're doing, please don't hesitate to reach out to Margot or myself. Um, and uh because we would love to engage, because we really do think that uh, you know, keeping on doing the same thing without trying to look at how we can address this challenge differently is going to is is means we're we're you know we're gonna be having these same conversations in another 10 years if we're still around, Lucy. Right.

SPEAKER_02 34:32

Indeed. Uh look, uh Margot and Yasmin, I think particularly you, Yasmin, will know that uh one of the big uh problems is the short-term political cycle. Uh as far as I'm concerned, uh, however, that short-termist thinking is uh very widespread, not just in politics, but in most organizations. Uh turn around, get your outcomes, report on the metrics yesterday, and so on and so forth. And this hinders long-term, well, medium-term and long-term thinking. And when it comes to migrants, really, and labour market integration and workplace integration and cross-cultural issues, uh, we need to change the parameters of our thinking in temporal terms and also spatial terms, so that we understand the cross-border implications of all of this. Uh, I might just also point out this is not just an Australian problem. Um, there are people I know working on refugees and migrants in other countries, including the ILO, of course. Um, but in Austria, there are scholars that have said, look, you know, that they've taken in a lot of Ukrainians since the war began there, and their qualifications aren't recognized either. They say they are, that they will support them. So this is a global phenomenon, and I think really we need to encourage not just government, not just policy makers, but employers, educators to think, to broaden out the thinking uh so that we're also mindful of the cross-generational implications of this short-term thinking and lack of integration. Yeah, I hope that helps.

SPEAKER_03 36:41

Yeah, no, thank you. Thank you so much for your time, Lucy. We really appreciate it. Thanks very much, Margot. Um, thank you all for um joining us today, and I hope you found it interesting, and please don't help hesitate to reach out to us um if you would like more information. Thanks so much. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 37:01

And thank you.

SPEAKER_03 37:02

Thanks, Lucy.

SPEAKER_00 37:09

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.