VET News

NERO: Predicting the NOW, Through Nowcasting

The Nowcast of Employment by Region and Occupation — NERO — is a new experimental dataset developed by the National Skills Commission.

NERO provides timely information on employment at detailed levels, including 355 occupations across 88 regions in Australia. Until now, data at this level of detail was only readily available once every five years as part of the ABS Census of Population and Housing. With NERO, the insights will be available monthly.

As a new source of labour market intelligence, NERO will provide unique and detailed data on employment trends across occupations and regions – in excess of 30,000 series in total.

This data will provide more timely assessments of how regional labour markets are evolving and occupational trends within regional labour markets.

NERO uses an emerging methodology called ‘nowcasting’, which applies both traditional and real-time data, as well as big data techniques, such as machine learning, to estimate current trends. Nowcasting is different to forecasting in that it doesn’t attempt to predict or anticipate the future—its focus is on understanding the now.   

NERO can be searched either by occupation or by region with the data available for download in a variety of ways.

Release dates

This first release of NERO includes data from September 2015 to April 2021. Updates for May through to August 2021 are scheduled to be released on 1 September 2021, with subsequent updates to occur on the first Wednesday of each month.

Feedback welcomed

At this stage, the NERO estimates are experimental in nature. 

The National Skills Commission welcomes feedback about how the NERO estimates can be improved.  Email: nowcasting@skillscommission.gov.au.

Date posted Jul 22, 2021