WHY JOBS COMMITTEE HAS TOUGH ROAD AHEAD

THE new Regional Jobs Committee has a difficult job ahead of it. Newly formed and meeting for the first time this week, members with experience across education, business and government are being tasked to examine the challenges and opportunities to fix a skills shortage and grow jobs.

Their remit is to explore these within a 90km radius of Cairns and to come up with a strategic plan within a year for the state government to act on. This band will have to be forward thinking and pre-emptive because we have a dire skills shortage that started before Covid hit. With participation in the workforce dipping at one point through the pandemic by about 10 per cent, the problem has worsened. People either don’t want to work or don’t have the right skills.

The committee has pointed to the fact that younger workers’ needs are different to previous generations. Millennials want more than lucrative pay-packets, so don’t think your oldfashioned chequebook is going to be enough to lure and keep them.

They want reason and meaning in their work.

The committee also highlighted the need to re-engage retirees and semiretirees to tap into their skills.

That’s going to be tricky.

For anyone who had been planning retirement before Covid, then was forced into lockdown, made redundant or had their hours reduced, it would be difficult to entice them back full-time because attitudes to work and life have changed for many.

The other big difficulty this committee faces is the pure lack of housing and an easy solution for it. Even if you have a job to offer, where are these people going to live?

The RJC is looking at shaping for the Olympics and defence among other things in the long term but they face strong headwinds to produce quick and meaningful wins in the short-to-medium term, made all the more difficult when dealing with government.