Report shows 8 million workers lack job skills

Australia's industry skills councils have issued a warning to the Federal Government that the numeracy and literacy skills of Australian workers are getting worse rather than better.

Eleven councils commissioned the report that shows 8 million Australians do not have the reading, writing and maths skills required to train for a trade or a professional job.

The report titled No More Excuses says around 53 per cent of working age Australians have difficulty with numeracy, and 46 per cent of Australian adults have problems with reading.

Rhoni Stokes, from the Community Services and Health Industry Skills Council, says the findings present a significant challenge to all industries, especially when combined with the looming skills shortage.

"Over the next five years we [will] have an estimated shortage of 215,000 workers," she said.

"Many of these new workers will probably come as new immigrants into Australia and also will need to come from the underemployed groups of workers.

"Many of these underemployed workers have issues with language, literacy and numeracy."

The councils are calling on the Government to put in place a 10-year plan to improve adult education and the quality of training in high schools.

Ms Stokes says the failure to improve skills levels could have potentially devastating impacts.

"We are talking about the health and wellbeing of people," she said.

"No-one wants to have a carer who may be writing down the wrong sort of instructions [or] may be having difficulty understanding the message that is being communicated."

Ms Stokes says there needs to be greater support for workers who do try to improve their literacy and numeracy.

"Many people who do undertake training, because of this challenge in this area, cannot complete the training that they undertake, so there needs to be greater assistance and support in it," she said.

"Certainly as a skills council ourselves, one of the areas that we are looking at is ensuring that there is actually the appropriate qualified LLN [language, literacy and numeracy] trainers able to deliver and train."

The Government has acknowledged the problem and is hinting there may be money in this year's budget to help deal with it.

and the lazy government and tight fisted industry policies are to write them off and bring in skilled migrants from overseas ready to go

You need to ask yourself why has the population of this country been dumbed down so much ??

bogarde73 wrote on Apr 4^th, 2011 at 3:50pm:


Now, there really are some serious issues there!

But, can I suggest one of them, is whoever put the report together, because I could not agree that 70% of the Australian workforce does not posses the numeracy and literacy skills, needed to do their jobs!

However, reading on, does provide an explanation, as we see that it was a local council report!

Finally, we should not fall into the trap of using the coming decline in available worker numbers, to increase immigration, this could only end in tears for all, for a number of reasons.

BTW, I just saw a segment about this on the ABC - and it would seem to me that the authors of this report have communication problems of their own...

The guy on the ABC wasn't really referring to basic skills of reading, comprehension and maths - he was talking about other skills - computing and scientific skills in particular...

Oh, and if people are expecting that adult education is going to help people with poor comprehension skills, then they're in for a rude shock...since this is one aspect of intelligence that remains fairly constant in an individual and it determines an individual's capacity (or not) to acquire, process, retain and utilise new information...

A serious issue is if your bike conks out at 2am in the middle of nowhere.

That x million common factory fodder out there can't spell their name or read the captions in an issue of Picture magazine isn't.

I can both spell my name and read both the captions and the "articles" in an issue of Picture and even Hustler, so I'm okay and my care factor is as close to zero as it can possibly get,