Attracting information communications and technology (ICT) talent to the public service has been a running issue in Australia.
This has been attributed to the lower pay on offer for specialist ICT roles in the APS, but there is an absolute shortage of digitally literate workers spread throughout the economy as a whole.
This is a pivotal time for the ICT workforce, with demand for skills skyrocketing faster than new people are training to obtain them.
A report authored by RMIT Online and Deloitte Access Economics says despite an increased focus on learning and development in the private sector in recent years, organisations are not prioritising these in-demand skills.
While this has direct effects on the businesses themselves, it also fails to increase the total number of people with the ICT training that make up four out of five of the most in-demand skills.
RMIT Online CEO Nic Cola said as digital literacy becomes more essential to all kinds of work, it will become a fundamental skill for most workers.
He said policymakers should consider making education in this area mandatory to ensure a base level of skills across the entire workforce.
“The majority of jobs [already] have some form of digital capability needed, so when we think about skills we think not only technical skills and specialists, but how you upskill the broader workforce in digital skills,” he said.
“There’s that basic level of competency you need around digital skills. That includes things like digital literacy — actually being able to think critically about what you’re presented by search engines; to actually being able to use things like the cloud, being able to think about data.
“I think for the majority of jobs now there’s some kind of IT component, it just depends which end of the spectrum you’re at. My wife is a historian and probably at one end of the spectrum. I’m in digital education and probably at the other end of the spectrum.”
The recently released Australian Universities Accord says that to meet future skills demands, “at least 80%” of the workforce will need tertiary qualifications by 2050. The current number of workers with post-high school training in Australia is less than 60%.
The government already has a head start on this coming skills crisis, with 76% of agencies reporting a shortage of ICT workers.
One saving grace of this shortage is that while the shortage is broad, Cola doesn’t think it is particularly deep.
The ambivalence many public servants feel about subjects like artificial intelligence and AI is reflected in the low number of workers or departments that claim confidence or competence in these skills.
Only 14% of public servants are confident in using AI tools for their work, and 74% said they rarely or never used AI in their work in a recent survey conducted by tech firm Appian.
The reality is it would be all but impossible to engage with the most common web-based applications without engaging with AI. Social media, search engines, and email clients all make use of neural networks — the same technology at the heart of generative AI software like ChatGPT and DALL•E.
While this technology is young and people continue to grapple with ethics and best use cases, Cola thinks there is still time for people to develop these basic skills before they become absolutely fundamental.
“In terms of the best way to approach that, I think it’s about information asymmetry or awareness — just understanding and training in the ethical uses of AI. it’s about what’s best practice, what are the limitations, and what are the harms,” he said.
“The majority of Australians have had some interaction with an AI or a robot … It’s very hard to interact with a bank, interact with a telco. For example, think about the broad services connected with your electricity provider. In some cases, you can’t interact with government without being part of a large language model.”
Skills shortages in the education and health sectors have proven more intractable than many policy experts anticipated, with many of the incentives offered by the government for people to work in areas of highest demand failing to alleviate the problem in the long term.
In-place training has proven to be more effective for insular areas, like rural and regional communities. Counterintuitively, this might be an issue the APS shares.
The public service has fundamentally different goals, priorities and cultures, to an extent it can feel like a foreign country to people entering from the private sector; government services minister Bill Shorten was not the first to quip the public service can resemble its own feudal kingdom.
Coupled with lower pay, this means even people who do develop the necessary skills may be reluctant to jump into the public service.
Microcredentials already form part of the APSC’s capabilities uplift policy — something Cola thinks is a sensible move in this context.
In the context of the APS, he could allow almost anyone to gain the most needed skills in the shortest space of time, bringing them back to their department instead of taking time out of the workforce to fully retrain.
“This is not about starting a big postgraduate program where you’re going to learn a basket of skills, this is about going actually, I want to know this and I need to know it a little bit better than watching a YouTube video on a Friday night,” he said.
“It can be more targeted to where they’re at right now, so I’m learning a skill I actually need. There’s a productivity increase for the employer, but for the employee, an increase in their relevance.
“The backbone of this is really being good about your skills mapping and targeting the skills that you really need … for the public service, it’s a much cheaper and faster option.”
READ MORE:
The five most in-demand skills in the government sector in 2024
