Australia’s Skills Shortage Set To Peak In 2012 – Predicting Business Growth And Development.

Canberra’s business leaders are warning the city’s skills shortage is about to become worse.

The Canberra Business Council says the global financial crisis has masked the issue over the past 12 months but as the economy recovers the problem is re-emerging. Chief executive Chris Faulks says thousands of baby boomers are expected to retire in the next five years, peaking in 2012.

“We’re going to see a lot of people exiting the work force at that point and not enough people to replace them,” she said.

“We are facing a very, very significant skills shortage and that will impact on the capacity of business to grow and also the economic wellbeing of the economy here.”

Ms Faulks warns if Federal Government departments cannot attract staff they may be forced to move out of Canberra if they cannot attract staff.

“There are already signs of that in the public sector where some of the IT areas have gone to South Australia and you’re looking at other departments that are moving sections of their work out of the ACT,” she said.

“That will have an enormous economic impact on the ACT.”

Ms Faulks says the key is managing population growth

“We’ve got wonderful institutions here to train our workforce but we really struggle to keep population and to grow our population in the ACT,” she said.

“Even though we’ve had a little bump in our natural increase in population, the reality is that the ACT relies almost entirely on net migration and a lot of that comes from interstate.

“So we will have to attract workers from interstate to come here and live and work. We need to be able to sell Canberra as a wonderful place to come and live and work.”

Source ABC News