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 Nursing Support and Personal Care Workers. 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.
The health protection and environmental management system (and its workforce) manage risks to public health associated with modifiable environmental risk factors such as air, water and soil pollution, chemical exposure, environmental degradation, climate change and radiation. Strengthening the Front-Line Health Protection and Environmental Management Workforce in Tasmania: A Workforce Development Strategic Plan for Environmental Health Officers reiterates the importance of EHOs, particularly at a local community level. Despite being one of the most essential professions for protecting human health, the environmental health profession is under-recognised, overlooked and misunderstood. This document provides directions for improving areas related to: workforce management, planning and monitoring, whilst also addressing recruitment and retention.
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 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.
Trajectories: The Interplay Between Mental Health and Housing Pathways. Policy Priorities for Better Access to Housing and Mental Health Support for People with Lived Experience of Mental Ill Health and Housing Insecurity states that an important policy priority is to develop and deliver training and resources to grow the capacity of housing workers to sustain the tenancies of those with lived experience of mental ill health. Housing workers in both the private rental market and in social housing have an important role to play in assisting people to maintain their tenancies. Frontline housing workers are often in a position to identify vulnerable tenants, detect when a crisis may be emerging and link tenants with the right supports to assist them to sustain their tenancy. However, due to high workloads, a lack of understanding and knowledge, and a lack of resources housing workers can struggle to identify, monitor and appropriately respond to tenancy issues among people with lived experience of mental ill health. The capacity of housing workers could be extended by developing and delivering mental health training for front line workers and managers in order to increase their capability to identify and respond to potential housing issues among people with lived experience of mental ill health. The training should be backed by online resources available to workers to enable them to respond swiftly and appropriately. This training would need to expand beyond mental health first aid training to incorporate elements on how to identify and respond to early warning signs of mental ill health, managing difficult behaviours and trauma informed care and practice.
The Tasmanian Council of Social Service (TasCOSS) has developed A Community Services Industry Built for Tasmania's Future: Community Services Industry Plan 2021–2031. One of the strategic priorities in the Plan is ‘Workforce development and training’ – ensuring the industry has the skilled and diverse workforce it needs to deliver flexible, responsive services that can withstand future disruptors and achieve positive outcomes for clients. Community services is one of the largest and fastest growing industries in Tasmania, employing more than 17,800 local workers statewide, supported by a workforce of around 35,000 volunteers. The Community Services industry requires 4,000 new jobs by 2024 to keep pace with demand. Attracting and retaining workers is an ongoing challenge, especially in a competitive labour market and in rural and regional Tasmania. At the same time, there is an increasing requirement for higher level skills and training within the workforce. Challenges also exist in the volunteer workforce where there is a forecast gap in demand and supply of volunteers of 40% by 2029.
Despite the significant economic contribution, the important work delivered by the social sector and the growing need, major challenges are confronting the social sector workforce according to the report The Social Sector in NSW: Capitalising on the Potential for Growth. Workforce shortages are emerging, with vacancies in key occupations including care and welfare workers increasing by over 2.6 times in regional NSW over the past five years. Many workers face job instability and low pay: half of the state's social sector workers are employed in fixed-term or casual positions. Significant rising demand and unmet need is driving chronic stress and mental health concerns for social sector workers and undermining service quality. The report finds:
- The NSW social sector provides essential care and support to over one million people each year – including those impacted by poverty, homelessness, domestic violence, mental health challenges, disability or other complex issues.
- In the five years before the COVID-19 pandemic, one in eight jobs created in NSW was in the social sector.
- The NSW social sector employs over 230,000 people, with annual economic output worth $15.4 billion.
- Four out of five workers in the social sector in NSW are women.
- The social sector will demand an additional 62,000 jobs by 2030, including 27,000 in regional NSW.
- $1 billion net investment in care industries by governments could lift economic activity in NSW by $10 billion per year through direct generation of jobs and freeing up informal carers to participate in the labour market.
The Australian Federal Government recognises the importance of attracting and retaining a workforce that delivers critical frontline social services to vulnerable Australians and is providing $132.6 million from 2020-21 to support social services impacted by the cessation of the Social and Community Services Special Account according to the summary document Supporting Social and Community Services Sector Workers: Budget 2020–21. This funding will sustain employment and wages of women, in the sector, particularly in regional and remote areas. Women represent 84% of the 500,000 Australians employed in the social services sector. The Social and Community Services Wage Supplementation was a temporary measure intended to support the implementation of Fair Work Australia's decision to grant an Equal Remuneration Order to increase wages for low paid workers in the community services sector.
