Image: Australian Industry Group Chief Executive, Innes Willox, appears as a guest panellist at Jobs and Skills Australia’s Roadshow 2025 event in Melbourne in November
Jobs and Skills Australia (JSA) has released its Jobs and Skills Report 2025 – Connecting for Impact: Aligning Productivity, Participation and Skills. The report argues that Australia’s productivity and participation challenges are increasingly shaped by structural shifts in the labour market, technological change, and demographic trends.
The report highlights that better alignment between people’s skills and job opportunities is critical to lifting both productivity and participation where national productivity growth has stalled, and participation remains uneven across demographic cohorts and regions. Improved matching between skills and jobs is identified as a strategic lever to address these issues, with inclusive participation and lifelong learning emerging as key enablers of workforce resilience and innovation.
Persistent barriers to workforce participation – particularly for First Nations people, people with disability, women, and older workers – are contributing to occupation shortages and limiting economic potential. The report finds that occupations with more inclusive workforces are less likely to be in shortage, especially when inclusivity is paired with well-matched skills. Foundation and employability skills are essential to enabling participation and productivity, and targeted interventions are needed to address disparities in access, outcomes, and representation. The report affirms that “employers play a critical role in shaping job opportunities, job quality, attraction and retention of workers with the desired skills and workforce demand”.
Employment projections to 2035 show continued growth in service industries and higher-skilled occupations, with strong demand for digital and human-centric capabilities. Generative AI is expected to augment rather than replace most roles, accelerating skill change and requiring coordinated action to manage risks and realise benefits. The report recommends aligning tertiary education attainment targets with labour market demand, embedding contemporary digital and AI skills in qualifications, and supporting flexible, responsive training systems, and that a more balanced post-secondary education system is essential to meet future workforce needs.
To support improved matching and system responsiveness, the report calls for national reform across education, migration, and workforce planning. Key recommendations include developing a National Skills Taxonomy, establishing a national credit transfer system, and enhancing data infrastructure to track outcomes and transitions.
A copy of the report can be viewed here.
