Australia faces challenges arising from lagging productivity growth, but also has significant opportunities as we move towards the second quarter of the century. Productivity is important because it enables sustainable economic and income growth. It is also integral to maintaining and improving living standards and quality of life. Productivity gains support the ability to invest in services such as healthcare, education and infrastructure.
The Ai Group Centre for Education and Training's position paper Australia’s opportunity: a skills and productivity agenda addresses productivity in the Australian economy with a focus on a key driver of productivity – capability development. It argues that a skills and capability development agenda can improve lagging productivity and enable other economic and social benefits. It can lead to a broad range of productivity enrichments including digital technologies, infrastructure investment, productivity in the care and education sectors, and the opportunities from a net zero transition.
The paper outlines the imperative of productivity, long-term productivity patterns, skills and workforce development initiatives to support productivity, and examples of companies actively improving their workforce to positively impact productivity. The paper provides Ai Group’s priorities for capability development in support of a thriving Australian future.
A capability development agenda needs to focus on both increasing skill levels for a more productive generation of outputs and technological and process improvements, as well as on the more effective use of skills through better structured work organisation. Ai Group believes these areas can be successfully tackled by reforming Australia's education and training and policy settings through both system reform and architecture, and targeted policy and program reform.
The final element in this quest for capability development-driven productivity improvement is a robust partnership culture in Australia. Employers and education providers must be widely connected, with these relationships built into policy design, implementation and delivery, and workforce planning. Beyond this, success will be dependent on strong connections between economic and workforce development in our country.
