Industry insights on skills needs
The Community Sector and Development IRC's 2019 Skills Forecast suggests the top priority skills for the sector are all soft skills, ranging from teamwork and communication through to flexibility and self management. The top five identified generic skills are:
- Communication / Virtual collaboration / Social intelligence
- Learning agility / Information literacy / Intellectual autonomy and self management (adaptability)
- Managerial / Leadership
- Language, Literacy and Numeracy (LLN) (Foundation skills)
- Customer Service / Marketing.
According to the job vacancy data, the top requested skills by employers in the sector were communication skills and planning. The most advertised occupations were Health and Welfare Services Managers followed by Enrolled and Mothercraft Nurses. The top employers were the New South Wales Government and the Government of Victoria. The top locations for job advertisements were New South Wales and Victoria.
The Community Sector and Development IRC's 2019 Skills Forecast highlights several challenges the sector has been experiencing which are impacting workforce skills requirements, including:
- Government policy/legislation changes – A number of national and state/territory-based Royal Commissions into areas of relevance for the sector (i.e. child protection, family violence, aged care, etc.) have released key recommendations impacting workforce practices.
- Skills shortages – Skills gaps identified represent a combination of technical and 'soft skill' areas (e.g. cultural and engagement skills with various population groups, skills to identify family violence incidents, etc.).
- Low retention of staff – Reasons for staff turnover are attributed to various factors including a lack of career pathways, the difficulty or complexity of client demands, the lack of security of employment and the burn-out of staff.
- Lack of career progression opportunities available – The workforce strongly desires more varied and innovative career progression opportunities.
- Ageing workforce – This is a contributing factor to the numbers of staff leaving the sector, and employers are challenged in adapting workplace arrangements that will encourage a substantial number of mature-age workers to remain in work. The advantages of retaining mature-age workers include their extensive work experience, maturity levels/professionalism, strong work ethic and reliability. Strategies to establish workforce sustainability issues, including the retention of mature-age workers, are required at both a government and an institutional level and should involve changes to human resource practices, raising the profile and status of the workforce, and implementing sector-wide strategies to address workplace remuneration and conditions.
- Caseload management – The number of cases assigned to a practitioner and the associated time pressure poses a significant issue for the workforce. Practitioners may be managing more than 25 cases at any one time, which places significant pressures on workers to effectively support clients and their families. These pressures can cause low job satisfaction and recruitment and retention issues for organisations. The development of skills in caseload management, including self-management, resilience and emotional intelligence, is critically important for community services workers.
The above Skills Forecast also reveals that employers have indicated that for occupations in this sector, they are looking for workers with skills so they can care for, empathise and communicate with a range of audiences.
Key findings in the South Australian Community Services Workforce Insights report include:
- The community services sector is expected to grow over the next five years, driven by a combination of the NDIS, government funding, income and donations.
- For many community cohorts, homogeneous services create barriers and further disadvantage vulnerable people.
- There is potential for the community services sector to move to a more person-centred care model, to offer services tailored to the specific needs of consumers.
- Working conditions, including low wages and casualisation, mean retention is a problem for the sector.
- The community services workforce must reflect the diversity of the community and the consumers that access services.
- The lack of adequate services in regional areas adds to the disadvantage faced by vulnerable people in these locations.
- A reliance on fly in, fly out health and community services workers in regional and remote areas restricts the development of trusting relationships for consumers, and limits the ability of regional communities to build their own workforce.
In the article Environmental Health in Australia: Overlooked and Underrated, the authors remind us that improvements in environmental health have had the most significant impact on health status. In Australia, life expectancy has significantly increased through provision of vaccination, safe food and drinking water, appropriate sewage disposal and other environmental health measures. Yet the profession that is instrumental in delivering environmental health services at the local community level is overlooked. Rarely featuring in mainstream media, the successes of Environmental Health Officers (EHOs) are invisible to the general public. As a consequence, students entering tertiary education are unaware of the profession and its significant role in society. This has resulted in there being too few EHOs to meet the current regulatory requirements, much less deal with the emerging environmental health issues arising from changing global conditions including climate change. To futureproof Australian society and public health this workforce issue, and the associated oversight of environmental health, must be addressed now.
Workforce strengths and gaps, workers' skills and skill development needs, and perceptions of service capacity and sustainability challenges are explored in the National Survey of Workers in the Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Sectors report. Key findings include:
- The workforce is strongly female dominated with more than 80% of workers identifying as female.
- Services located in major cities tend to employ higher proportions of workers from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds, while those in remote areas employed higher proportions of employees from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds.
- Less than two in three felt they received appropriate induction when they commenced in the service.
- Workers generally reported feeling confident identifying signs of abuse, however, fewer said they were confident identifying financial or sexual abuse, compared with physical or emotional abuse.
- Many workers felt they needed additional training to support specific client groups, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, LGBTIQ people affected by violence, asylum seekers, people with experience of homelessness, and perpetrators of violence.
- More than 90% of workers reported having a post-school qualification (36.3% had a bachelor level qualification and a further 30.5% had a postgraduate degree), however, while the sector is highly qualified, not all workers felt their formal qualifications had provided good preparation for working with people affected by domestic and family violence or sexual assault.
- Workers with the highest levels of contact with people affected by domestic and family violence and sexual assault were more likely to have participated in relevant training in the last 12 months.
- Workers in frequent contact with victims of sexual assault were more likely than others to receive relevant training, and to have received larger amounts of training.
- Among workers in leadership positions (CEOs, senior managers, team leaders), three quarters of men had undertaken management or leadership training, but only two thirds of women had done so.
Volunteering and Settlement in Australia: a Snapshot states that volunteering is critical to delivering the Australian Government's priorities of building strong and resilient communities, by encouraging economic participation, mitigating isolation and loneliness, and increasing social inclusion, community resilience, participation and social cohesion. Volunteering has woven itself into the fabric of everyday life, and Australian society increasingly depends on volunteering activities and programs. This report is based on a National Survey on Volunteering and Settlement in Australia and key findings include:
- In the settlement sector, 65% of new arrivals to Australia volunteered within the first 18 months of their arrival to Australia, to contribute to society, make friends, improve their English or gain local work experience.
- There is great benefit to providing cultural competency training and resources to better place organisations to engage with volunteers from diverse backgrounds.
- There is strong interest (88% of respondents) reported in the development of culturally appropriate volunteering resources and training models.
- Additional funding would enable organisations to provide volunteers with training and better equipment.
The Handbook for Grassroots Organisations Helping People Experiencing Homelessness recommends training volunteers in understanding homelessness, working with vulnerable people, first aid and mental health first aid, and understanding complex trauma. The need to provide information on self-care so volunteers will be able to process and cope with difficult situations they may experience is also critical. The handbook includes a list of relevant training courses.
Emergency Volunteering 2030: Views from Managers in Volunteerism identifies a range of issues impacting volunteer sustainability, including:
- An ageing volunteer base and difficulty in attracting younger volunteers
- Insufficient and declining numbers of volunteers overall
- Increased competition for volunteers, either with other organisations or with people’s other time commitments such as work and family
- Rural recruitment and retention difficulties
- Low volunteer diversity
- High drop-out rates
- Volunteer fatigue.
To re-engage volunteers as part of retention strategies, different approaches to restructuring and tailoring training of ongoing volunteers include: consolidating training; developing online training modules; introducing more accredited training; and making diverse and interesting training opportunities available to volunteers.
The Digital Mentoring in Australian Communities report focuses on the important role of digital mentors who help others acquire digital ability, facilitating learning between end users and digital technologies. Digital mentoring takes many forms. It may involve people volunteering time and skills to help others, or community-based workers going 'above and beyond' to help customers in libraries and post offices, for example. Digital mentoring ranges from more formal and structured programs to less formal and everyday activities.
There is a growing sentiment in the community sector that mentors play a vital role in improving digital ability, and therefore contribute significantly to the broader digital inclusion effort. There is also recognition that while digital mentoring can be rewarding, it can also be challenging for both the mentor and the mentee. Mentors need specific skills to deal with the technical, social, cultural and ethical issues that can arise during digital mentoring interactions. Many of these skills can be acquired organically over time through experience. However, having a holistic approach to supporting mentors could enable mentees to reach their goals and learn digital skills more quickly, and improve overall outcomes for the community.
The article Transcending the Professional-Client Divide: Supporting Young People with Complex Support Needs Through Transitions, highlights the importance of human-centric skills for youth workers to connect with young people and bring about positive outcomes. Key skills include:
- Non-judgmental listening
- Displaying genuine interest in connecting with young people and understanding and accepting what is important to them
- Being able to identify pathways through disruption or crisis
- Coordinating appropriate supports
- Building relationships with young people that reinforce their worth and generate a sense of belonging and being cared for.
The Understanding the Experience of Social Housing Pathways report explores the ways households experience pathways into, within and out of the Australian social housing system. An increasing body of research locates the successful delivery of human services in the quality of the relationships that are formed between workers and clients. Service users stress the importance of finding the 'right' worker to achieving meaningful outcomes, while inconsistency in workers or high turnover in staff are identified as destructive. Implicit in the provision of housing assistance are ideas of support and care. Being 'care-full' is intrinsic to good practice, while poor practice is often 'care-less'. This research found that although housing and related services might be provided to tenants, these services were not necessarily provided with care. Tenants shared many examples of care-less practice that was disrespectful, alienating and hurtful. Examples of care-full practice, where they did exist, were mostly related to the establishment and preservation of good relationships between tenants and individual workers. Such relationships were vital for tenants but could be undermined by a lack of resources and burnout amongst workers.