Jobs in Demand - Australia 2019

[Guest The Pom Queen]

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has tracked the rise and fall of skill sets (occupations) as well as of industries on a quarterly basis for more than 30 years. Some occupations have disappeared, others have appeared. At its core this dataset tells the story of the demand for office, industrial and retail property.

There are 20 occupations in Australia that support almost four million jobs, or one-third of the Australian workforce. These 20 jobs have been in demand for 30 years or more, although some are now very much under threat.

Take, for example, the most common job in Australia — sales assistant, which accounts for 434,921 jobs, or 3 per cent of the workforce.

Technically, this job is up 133,100, or 44 per cent, on the 1987 figures but it is down 126,174 jobs on 2016 figures. The most common job in Australia peaked three years ago and is now subsiding, which could well be a metaphor for the strategic planning of retail property portfolios.

There is growth in the retail workforce but not in the everyday salesforce. The fastest-growing job in Australia over the last three years (since 2016) has been checkout operator and cashiers — up 91,000 positions, or 69 per cent, to 223,901 positions. Yes, self-service check-outs are becoming more common in supermarkets, but a far more common trend is for shops to offer fewer on-floor sales assistants and to reassign (fewer overall) staff to the checkout process. The logical extension of this trend is for the checkout process to eventually be fully automated.

In the last three years there has been a diminution in demand for chief executives and managing directors, down 31,648 positions, or 52 per cent, and for retail , down 14,868 positions, or 31 per cent. General managers are also on the back foot, down 11,327 positions, or 20 per cent.

Sure, there’s been a diminution of workers such as handypersons (down 22 per cent), bank workers (down 15 per cent) and secretaries (down 13 per cent), but the biggest structural losses in recent years have been in management. (This is possibly because the big structural shifts in worker jobs took place before 2016.)

Even the pharmacist workforce is down 11 per cent since 2016, possibly as a consequence of pharmacy products and services now spilling into a smaller number of bigger formats.

The workforce’s rising elements are spread across a grab-bag of industries and skill sets. Yes, shops are morphing into big help-yourself warehouses behind a bank of soon-to-be-automated checkouts. But elsewhere there is rising demand for office space for tenants employing accountants (up 28,493 jobs, or 16 per cent, since 2016), software and applications programmers (up 32,941 jobs, or 32 per cent, since 2016) and advertising, public relations and sales managers (up 41,731 jobs, or 32 per cent, since 2016).

 

 

For the full list and article please read here: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/property/adapting-to-the-shifting-jobs-landscape/news-story/7f6378f3b124bf577afae2910736ba36