Want to get into horse breeding? Are you a pyschotherapist or a landscape designer? These are just three occupations newly listed as in shortage this year by a government agency.
Other occupations, such as roof tiler, gas fitter, mining engineer, psychologist and podiatrist, have consistently been listed as in shortage each year since 2021.
They are just some of the 127 occupations that have consistently faced worker shortages since 2021. They broadly fall into the field of technicians and trade workers and professionals.
Data from Jobs and Skills Australia shows despite shortages continuing to ease across several fields, companies are still struggling to fill many roles across a variety of industries. Twenty-eight new occupations were in shortage this year, spread across health, science, trades and operations. Some, such as student services adviser and exercise physiologist, are only listed as being in shortage in regional areas.
While technicians and trade workers make up the largest proportion of persistent shortages, other impacted roles tend to be in construction, early childhood education, engineering, health, and science.
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The government body suggests three key factors are contributing to shortages: constraints on the supply of potential workers, a lack of suitable applicants and retention issues.
Occupations in shortage tend to have longer vacancy durations and lower rates of being filled.
In industries experiencing a shortage, recruiters tended to identify half as many qualified and suitable candidates. On average, a job offered in an occupation with a shortage received six qualified applicants, and three suitable ones, compared to roles in non-shortage fields which had 13 qualified candidates and six suitable people for the position.
In this year's report, 279 occupations are in shortage across the country, representing 27 per cent of those assessed. The government body says this is down from the peak in 2023, when 36 per cent of assessed roles were in shortage.
Professor Larissa Bamberry, a professor of employment and gender relations at the Charles Sturt University School of Business, said discussions around workforce issues tend to use familiar narratives such as "we can't get people, we can't keep people, there aren't enough skilled workers".
"All those things can be true, but one of the most important things I've learnt from working with regional employers and communities is that workforce problems are rarely one single problem," she told SBS News.
"It's usually a mixture of a number of factors tangled together, and they need quite different policy responses."
Bamberry said it's better to consider a skills ecosystem approach to assess needs on a region-by-region basis, supported by collaboration between employers, TAFEs and universities to address concerns within that sector and region.
"We tend to go for pipeline responses, which are very much like, 'oh, we will just churn out the right number of people, and we'll hope that those people end up in the right industries and in the right locations'," she said.
Employers in regional areas tend to find it harder to fill vacant roles. In regional areas, 15 occupations are in shortage, decreasing from 21 last year.
Bamberry said a tailored approach allowed policy responses to better address the needs of potential applicants.
Potential issues range from access to public transport, roads, transportation and internet service, through to the distance to education facilities or the demographics of the community.
Instead, she proposes tailoring "the people that we train, the places where we train them, and the industries that we train for".
In some areas, there may be enough interested workers, but the skills needed for their roles continue to change.
"There's a lot of people who have the knowledge they need for farming, but don't necessarily have the data analysis, sort of technical skills that are required in modern farming these days because we've got AI and we've got so much technological change happening so rapidly," Bamberry said.
The way to fill these roles may be to connect people to the upskilling they seek, rather than increasing the number of potential workers more generally.
"You wouldn't necessarily want to start an international migration program, for example, around horse breeding, but you might have somebody who's got an interest in horse breeding who is in the particular location but hasn't got the particular skills that they need."
