VET News

Australian Skills are the Talk of the Town!

The  Australian Skills Classification, released last week by the National Skills Commissioner, Adam Boyton, enables Australians to start talking about skills in a consistent way for the first time.

The work of the National Skills Commission (NSC) has three long-term objectives:

• to make an enduring and relevant contribution to labour market information and quality
• to contribute to a labour market that effectively aligns skills needs with education and training
• to improve the accessibility and relevance of VET.

The NSC has set these objectives to guide their contributions to a strong Australian economy that has the right skills at the right time.

To this end, the NSC has developed and released a beta release discussion paper of its new Australian Skills Classification as an interactive online interface.  

Rather than using occupations and qualifications as proxies for skills, the Australian Skills Classification offers a new way of identifying the range of skills linked to occupations.

The Classification offers a richer understanding of the labour market by identifying common and transferable skills between occupations, and the connections within, and across, skills and occupations.

This Beta version release includes skills profiles for 600 occupations each comprising three elements:

• core competencies, 
• specialist tasks, and 
• technology tools.

It provides a consistent, up to date, data driven skills framework to complement ANZSCO (Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations).  It provides a universal skills language for thinking about all the skills that are embedded in over 600 occupations.

At Velg Training's 2021 VET CEO Conference held last week, Commission Boyton said, "What this enables us to do is to look at the specific skills in occupations and ask, for example, how well does this align with the training package?  Or it enables us to think about occupations that might be similar and use a range of similar skills.  This classification provides us for the first time the language that takes us from occupations to skills in an Australian sense, it compliments ANZSCO quite neatly, and is data driven. ".

As a pillar of the NSC's Jobs and Education Data Infrastructure (JEDI) project, the Australian Skills Classification represents an important step in the NSC's broader work to develop an economy-wide skills analysis and apply this information to help improve the operation of the labour market and the vocational education and training system. 

The beta release discussion paper provides the context for the first release of the Australian Skills Classification and the NSC is seeking feedback to help improve subsequent updates and ensure it remains relevant to the current and changing Australian context.  If you would like to submit your feedback you can access the survey here. 

• Access the discussion paper here.
• NSC News Centre Release.

Date posted Mar 25, 2021