National strategy needed to deal with skills shortage

The critical shortage of skills in the oil and gas industry will need to be filled by foreign workers unless the government and education providers develop a national strategy to deal with the shortage, the Australian Workforce and Productivity Agency (AWPA) has claimed.

The shortage cannot be addressed until government statistics are reformed to provide an accurate picture of workers in the industry and their skills profile, according to E-Oz Energy Skills Australia.

“An energy revolution is coming, with improved drilling technology unlocking an abundance of relatively green gas. But AWPA’s Keith Spence was spot on when he recently observed more needed to be done by governments and industry to train oil and gas workers,” said E-Oz Energy Skills Australia CEO Bob Taylor.

“Despite more than five years of pleading from industry for an investment in skills, the labour force is still not available to take advantage of the abundant opportunities.

“Recent rapid growth and forecasts of future expansion are actually concealing considerable concern among industry participants about the sector’s capacity to expand under existing labour-market conditions. We have heard repeatedly from business that the deepening skills shortage is endangering the development of infrastructure to support capacity expansion.”

Ineffective and outdated government statistics make it impossible to gauge the extent of the problem, Taylor says.

“The oil and gas sector is under represented in formal government statistics with no occupational code explicitly related to industry participants. Instead, its occupations are obscured within broad construction or plumbing classifications,” Taylor said.

“Compounding this problem is the fact that its industry codes are based on an outdated town gas industry which excludes transmission industry operations and pipeline transport. We do not have an accurate picture of how many workers are currently in the industry, their skills profile, and how growth can be expected to impact skills demand.

“For as long as this is the case, RTOs [registered training organisations] will have extreme difficulty in making a business case to justify the development of training resources, the recruitment of staff, and formation of partnerships with industry.”