On Australia’s young ICT skills gap

The number of Australian ICT professionals under the age of 30 has declined 66% in the last three years – according to a recent Greythorn Recruitment survey (ZDNet). Two reasons are given:

• Less graduates were coming through the education system (a drop of 36% in university enrolments since the peak in 2001)
• More young workers (up to 66%) were considering working overseas

(source: Greythorn quoted in ZDNet, 2014)

Previous STEM crisis articles, particularly the ‘STEM Crisis is a Myth‘ article from Robert Cherette, have commented on the boom/bust nature of ICT aspirations – that roughly every 10-15 years the tech sector experiences rapid growth and then collapses leaving a pile of faded dreams and jaded employees. In Australia our boom was 2001 – that was the height of university enrolments in tech degrees. The above charts capture this shift in demographics: anyone starting their degree in 2001 (aged roughly 17 or 18) would now be 30 or 31. By 2008 enrolments had dropped to 50% of the 2001 peak – this gives us a low replacement rate as evidenced above.

The Commonwealth’s Department of Education recently reported that “employers have little difficulty recruiting workers that meet who meet their skill level expectations” (Skills Shortage Australia, 2014). This may be the case in late 2013, early 2014 but I wonder what it will be like in five years time. One of the findings of last year’s AWPA report was that while there are currently enough ICT workers in Australia, younger generations are having trouble developing enough experience to be considered for local employment.