VET
away from the coast
The training for people who work in remote areas needs to focus on lifestyle issues as well as skills. By Llandis Barratt- Pugh
When I was developing a research proposal in 2011 focusing on skill shortages, I phoned a research colleague in Melbourne, who is also a highly skilled welder. I explained that as a West Australian I was becoming very interested in exploring the dilemmas of skills shortages and the related opportunities for training and relocation.
She listened to me, and told me quite firmly, that she did not believe that there was a real skill shortage for the resources industry, just a lack of skilled employees willing to relocate and work in remote environments, often dislocated from their family and social relations by intensive blocks of shift work.
In the past 12 months I have been involved in a study exploring the other side of this dilemma: costs and benefits associated with temporary migrant workers on 457 visas in the resources industry within WA.
While the thrust of the study has been to investigate their experiences with relocation agencies, in the workplace and in the community, the experiences of those managing recruitment and resettlement have continually provided information about the lack of success for their local training and recruitment programs.
Statements in the media about this issue usually take sides about whether such schemes are displacing local job opportunities or creating them through maintaining a rapidly growing economy.
The Australian Workforce and Productivity Agency in their recent July discussion paper about the
National Workforce Development Strategy, indicate that temporary skilled migration has always acted as a“ shock absorber” for the Australian labour market, contributing in the peaks and closing down in the troughs. Indeed as the voices in our study indicated, no company willingly spend in between $ 6000 and $ 60,000 on re-locating a skilled migrant if there is a more rational local alternative pathway.
Briefly, our project indicates that there are three groups of 457 temporary visa workers. One group are part of an international labour pool where highly and specialist skilled workers move from continent to continent and from project to project, for the same international employer. They typically leave WA for the next resources project in another country, on another continent.
There is another group who present skill-ready, employment-tested, and are willing to undertake remote working assignments who may or may not find future permanent residency an attraction. Finally there is a third group who do see the opportunity as a wonderful opportunity to change their lifestyle in the short term, and in the longer term to live and work in Australia permanently.
In many ways the evidence in the study indicates that the resources sector is currently making significant investment in building the skilled labour pool of the country for the future. Indeed Australia will also benefit from the knowledge such skilled workers bring with them as it remains within Australia even after they have departed. However, while our study has focused on exploring and bringing some empirical data into the debate about the costs and
34 | February 2013