Is Australian Manufacturing Attracting Enough School Leavers? 

The question of whether Australia continues to be a country where we make things depends on a number of factors: the price of imports, the cost of labour and resources, the desire of Australians to buy locally-made goods and the quality and design of what we are making in this country. 

The question of whether Australia continues to be a country where we make things depends on a number of factors: the price of imports, the cost of labour and resources, the desire of Australians to buy locally-made goods and the quality and design of what we are making in this country. 

Another factor we can add is the extent to which we get young people to join the manufacturing industry and make a career of it. Australian manufacturing is the sixth-largest employer in Australia, employing around 948,000 people and accounting for 6.7% of the workforce. Not bad for an industry that has slipped from 25% of the economy in the mid-1980s to 6% now. 

a group of people standing in front of a building
Manufacturing relies on skills, and those skills must be primarily developed in-house.

Australia also has a thriving advanced manufacturing scene, with the ability to produce value-added, premium-priced products for export and domestic consumption. However, according to Jobs and Skills Australia, manufacturing is lop-sided: only 4.7% of the 15-24 age group workforce is in manufacturing, while 7.2% of the 55+ workforce is in manufacturing. To add to the demographic difficulties, 72% of the manufacturing workforce is male. 

This creates challenges for businesses such as Harrison Manufacturing because manufacturing relies on skills, and those skills must be largely developed in-house. We need people with skills and qualifications, but then we need to develop their proficiency, which can take several years.  

We have a workforce skewed to male and over 55 – either retiring or at the pre-retirement stage – and few young people want to come into manufacturing. So, we have a pipeline problem in which the experienced and high-skill employees are going to retire, and the ranks behind them are not large enough, made worse by the fact that female participation is not drawn to this industry. The AI Group found that 40% of manufacturing businesses are having this problem attracting young people. 

What do we do about this? Here are some thoughts: 

Don’t Demonise The Trades

If you tell school kids that they have to go to university, that the word ‘blue collar’ is derogatory, and that the only pathway in life is to work in an office, you will develop school leavers who avoid sectors such as manufacturing.  

The report by the federal Education Department in February, Australian Universities Accord, is very focused on university education, proposing that the numbers enrolled by 2025 are doubled from the current 860,000 to 1.8 million. The report is interesting because it names manufacturing as one of the industries with the biggest employee growth-rates to 2033 – 143,600 extra employees, greater growth than construction or retail – and yet in manufacturing we know the hiring problem is not about university degrees, it’s concerned with skills.

The media wrote about this report from the university perspective, which is fair enough. But it leaves us with a culture weighted to university. Teachers, politicians and journalists should be able to discuss the trades and university degrees in their appropriate contexts – you do not have to tell young people that one is good and the other is bad. 

Manufacturing businesses like Harrison Manufacturing require a wide range of trades.

The Future Is Not All Digital

The media/political culture is fascinated with ‘future manufacturing’, ‘industry 4.0’ and manufacturing by 3-D printing. These theories are sexy and they grab headlines, but they do not deal with current manufacturing. Here is an example: to make our high-quality industrial grease products, we use boilers to develop extreme heat in some processes. We need bricklayers to maintain our boilers, and brickies are in very short supply. 

We have another challenge where an employee was undergoing a ‘connect/disconnect’ qualification, crucial for the safe use of large electricity loads in a factory. There was one machine he needed sign-off on, and we did not have that specific machine. So, the qualification process ground to a halt. In both these cases, the problem was skills, not digital transformation.

Encourage ‘Pathways’

The drop-out rate in universities is high, reflecting a mismatch of acumen to education. What we could be doing at a high school level is encouraging school leavers to think about career pathways, or ‘where do you see yourself in ten years?’  

The AI Group did some interesting research, which showed that by 25 years of age, two cohorts of young people – ‘postgraduate’ and ‘apprenticeship/traineeship’ – were the educational groups with full employment. And yet only 23% of males and 7% of females were taking the ‘apprenticeship/traineeship’ route. The authors commented on the disparity:  

Many of the occupations utilising these training pathways are in high demand. There is therefore a strong public policy imperative to grow the number of young Australians choosing these pathways. This would also reduce our reliance on skilled migration.” 

Fund TAFE Places

Manufacturing businesses like ours require a wide range of trades, including welders, fitters and turners and electrical engineers. And yet, our local TAFE has just dropped welding from its curriculum. This puts an extra hurdle in front of the young people trying to get qualified as a welder on the Northern Beaches of Sydney. Now, they have to travel to Western Sydney or the Central Coast to do their TAFE units, which creates a disincentive.  

Governments can do their bit by ensuring the educational infrastructure exists to support skills pathways for young people – creating hurdles is not the way to develop young people. 

Inviting Businesses

We cannot expect the government to do all the work. Employers in the manufacturing sector have seen the demographic changes coming for at least a decade and now with Baby Boomer employees are having their retirement gatherings in the lunch room, it is evident that a lot of skill and experience is walking out the door.  

Our job – as employers – is to show school leavers and young people a pathway. Not just ‘a job’, but a career that grows with them. I believe that along with governments and employers, unions could also contribute to a positive image of trades-qualified young people, and the future available to them.  

Where Can I Go?

I am a university-educated person who has worked in the professional/white-collar sector, and I have taught at university, before becoming the CEO of a manufacturing enterprise. So, I have seen the employment challenge from a few perspectives, and I know the tricks that are used with university graduate intakes.  

If you join a law or accounting firm, or a large bank or corporation, or a government department such as Treasury or Foreign Affairs and Trade, you are shown where you can go and what it will take to get there. The educational support is spelled out, the effort and reward KPIs are communicated along with the professional development components. At Harrison Manufacturing, we use these pathway-development methods with all of our employees – especially the young – because it gives us better staff retention and gives an employee a sense of growing and developing.  

Manufacturing Is Not In Dire Straits

Manufacturing is not in the dire straits that many commentators claim. The latest Grant Thornton ‘State of Australian Manufacturing’ report gives us a pretty good bill of health, and I believe that is the case because the manufacturers that survived the trade liberalisation program of the last 40 years have focused on high-value niches that are not so vulnerable to high volume/low price imports. In other words, Australian manufacturing is advanced manufacturing. Still, to maintain our edge, we need to invest in skills, and that means focusing on how we get young people into this sector. 

The industry itself can show a career pathway to young people by promoting the professionalism of the sector. Too often, manufacturing is seen on television and in the media, as negative or the punchline in a joke. And yet, here’s something to ponder: Harrison Manufacturing has an ISO 9001 quality management system, and many high-level processes to ensure things are done correctly. I haven’t worked in another company that has an ISO 9001, and yet it’s something which many manufacturers have in Australia as standard practice.

Perhaps the first step towards getting young Australians into manufacturing, is manufacturers showing more pride in what they do.


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