Australia’s Workforce of the Next Generation: Refugees and the Skills Shortage.

Given that some of the largest labour market sectors in Australia face skills shortages, making use of the professional skills of refugees makes sense as part of the solution. When they arrive in Australia, many refugees are already professional and business leaders. More than 140,000 refugees have arrived in Australia in the past few years and 18,500 are expected to arrive over the next four years. Often, during their perilous journeys here, they would have been business and professional leaders in their home countries. Supporting and upskilling refugees need not be especially expensive. It will provide much needed ‘human capital’ and may go some way to rectifying Australia’s skill deficits, and help in the economic recovery.

Understanding the Skills Gap in Australia

An Australian skills shortage has been hammering the domestic business landscape for the better part of a decade now, in areas such as health and community services, construction, information and communication technologies, and education. In recent years, Australia’s ageing population, an ever-shrinking birthrate and an increasingly tech-savvy world requiring ever-evolving and specialised requisite skill sets has contributed significantly to Australia’s endemic skills shortage. Many major sectors of Australia’s economy are facing staffing shortages while failing to fill key roles with qualified staff. The most recent edition of Australia’s national jobs boss annual report flagged ‘critical workforce shortages’ in more than 100 groups of occupations, while the Government’s Department of Employment, Skills, Small and Family Business recently named the construction and infrastructure sector as experiencing significant skill shortages, having failed to fill more than 200,000 vacant positions across Australia in the past two years alone.

The pandemic has only exacerbated the shortage of labour in an already tight market. Rising at the beginning of 2022 is the end (or endgames) of free-for-all immigration into countries that had become ‘receiving countries’, piggy-backing on particular needs in a privileged, pick-and-mix defence of ‘host countries’ hungry for plumbers, waiters, nurses and teachers. A competitive private sector could take the lead in encouraging employers to fill the skills vacuum suddenly and urgently emptying as a result. Refugees would be the hungriest, and by far the most needed, and the productivity as well as reputational gains for the employer are of a kind seldom matched.

Refugees as an Untapped Source of Talent

Many refugees come to Australia already with qualifications and with offshore or onshore experience in occupations Australia identifies as in-demand – for example, in health care, engineering, teaching and technology. Their skills are under-utilised by language difficulties, by the failure to recognise foreign qualifications, and by lack of access to professional networks. This is a pool of ‘job-ready human capital’ that might well assist Australia to fill critical skill vacancies.

These people ‘could be doctors, nurses or other health professionals’ – exactly what this country desperately needs to alleviate its health sector skills shortage. (‘User pays’ is the same phenomenon). This is a major national industry that pays its health professionals well, and which has been affected most (along with teachers) by a skills shortage. Of course, Australia does not currently have enough doctors to service the needs of its people (a shortage that accelerated when a federal Labor government closed down an overseas doctor training scheme – hence the advertisements). Those refugees would likely shift to the regions, including the Northern Territory (another place with the most serious doctor shortage).

The Benefits of Refugee Employment for Businesses

So using refugees as a supply of ‘skills’ or as a way of ‘filling the skills gap’ is good business. They often also value stability of employment because they have actually got here to a new country, they have gone through fear, instability and a struggle to get on. Also, many refugees have suffered trauma, but are extremely resilient. The skills refugees bring are not just technical – they are emotional too. Here is a cohort of seasoned high-performers who will offer you what you are looking for in the team – a drive, focus and ‘can-do’ attitude. Refugees will often have a strong work ethic and high motivation – they might have come from just getting by and doing the best they can to build a new life and to give back to their new country.

Other than providing immediate supply of labour, refugee workers with their diverse backgrounds have the potential to increase diversity in a company’s workforce. There are dozens of cross-cultural studies indicating that diversity can improve organisational creativity, innovation and problem-solving. Diverse teams come up with and think of more creative and innovative solutions. That allows companies to come up with better solutions as well.

Furthermore, firms with refugee employees signal to consumers, clients and the general public about the firm’s attitudes to corporate social-responsibility and social-inclusion issues – and this signal might be especially useful for the firm’s reputation and customer (client) engagement, given that clients’ and consumers’ attention to bigger corporate issues – of fair remuneration and working conditions, and increasing awareness of gaps and social problems in society involving issues such as discrimination and diversity – might increase consumers’ (clients’) interest in doing business with firms that give back to society.

Creating Pathways to Employment for Refugees

For refugees to fill these unfilled roles, they’d need realistic pathways to work that account for the realities of the refugee experience – including settlement language training, mentorship and introduction to the Australian job market. Or time can be spent learning about refugees by connecting employers more closely with refugees through organisations recruiting refugees into work in ways that make sense to employers, but build on refugees’ skills.

Another factor lies in the ability to secure recognition of those qualifications abroad. Refugees typically arrive with post-secondary credentials: degrees, diplomas and other awards. Such credentials are not typically recognised from the outset, mainly because there is no one-to-one mapping among awards in different jurisdictions. Recognition of credentials would be made easier if the relevant process could be sped up – some ways in which this might be the case are treated in greater detail later.-

Conclusion

But when younger workers outnumber older, Australia will be short of the skills that will most likely be in high demand as its labour force becomes ever more highly skilled and often hard to fill. Taking the step of hiring refugees and giving them a foothold in the world of work towards the development of a stronger skills base will help to meet the widening skills gap. Business cases for an improved bottom line will grow more ambitious. And so too will Australia’s economic future.

As a result, refugees can become economically independent integrated refugees who can contribute more to the places where they re-settle – and it’s a win-win for refugees and Australia. As more business understands that refugees can open up their thinking and change their businesses, Australia will be much better placed to meet its future workforce needs and build a more diverse and resilient economy.