Digital capability hit by student choices
AUSTRALIA’S ability to create a digitally-capable workforce to drive increased economic growth is being restricted by choices made in secondary school, a highpowered business panel said in Geelong yesterday.
Microsoft boss Steven Worrall said the country’s growing IT industry employed 650,000 people but there were only 6000 graduates with relevant degrees to fill the 20,000 new jobs being created every year.
“We need more and more people who can implement that capability and help translate it into a useful context in an organisation,” said Mr Worrall, the managing director of Microsoft in Australia.
Speaking at a Strong Australia Network event in Geelong, he said the industry needed access to people with technical skills but also those with groundings in humanities, ethics and philosophy.
“Those skills will be as essential in the future of our economy as any deep technical skill,” Mr Worrall said.
Part of the solution involves getting more girls into STEM subjects but Business Council of Australia chief executive Jennifer Westacott questioned whether secondary education was adequately preparing young people for work.
Ms Westacott said a crowded curriculum combined with students’ subject preferences were compromising their ability to contribute to the digital economy.
“You have to ask yourself, are kids really leaving school now with the composite requirements to actually work, or are they leaving with an interesting view of the world,” she said.
“I am worried that our curriculum has got distracted from fundamental teaching.”
The Business Council of Australia has proposed the creation of a lifelong skills account to help people who are displaced to reskill and retrain.
“That’s going to be our biggest challenge as an economy,” Ms Westacott said.
“It’s not just making sure people select the right things when they leave school, but that they can quickly skill up.”
The Strong Australia Network involves visits to regional Australian cities to look at the issues of greatest importance to regional business and the challenges in growing the regional economy.