In the wake of the federal government’s Jobs and Skills Summit last week, leaders from RMIT’s School of Computing Technologies explain how we can help tackle the urgent demand for digital professionals to fill growing tech workforce shortages in Australia, including in digital transformation.
With digital transformation well underway, companies across industries have been digitising their day-to-day operations and offerings for customers, and new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cloud Computing are already helping some businesses to analyse critical data and obtain valuable insights on what is on their horizon.
However, Australia’s current digital workforce has a shortage of professionals with work-ready skills to execute this critical digital transformation and put in place new technologies in a scalable and secure way across many organisations and industries.
The need to up-skill and transform the current workforce remains. A recent survey by PwC, for example, found that while six in 10 business leaders said the most important growth driver for their organisation is digital transformation, their biggest risk for achieving growth targets was to “find enough people” in the smaller workforce.
Karin Verspoor, RMIT’s Executive Dean School of Computing Technologies said Australia needs to almost double its tech workforce before 2030 to drive economic growth and ensure that Australia remains at the leading edge.
“It’s estimated an additional 650,000 tech workers will be needed in Australia alone by the end of the decade, and this demand will continue to rapidly grow,” she said.
“We will not achieve this with our current approach, focused on attracting school leavers to study IT/Computing. We need to broaden the pool of people that see technology as an attractive and fulfilling career option. This includes reskilling more women to join the tech workforce and increasing the diversity of people that we welcome into the sector, and that we train in our TAFEs and universities.”
