This opinion article by Business Council of Australia Chief Executive Bran Black was published in The Australian Financial Review on 11 February 2025.

When it comes to identifying and teaching new work skills, the data proves that business does it best. That’s why we need to make sure our national education agenda has Australia’s leading businesses at its heart.

Critical to ensuring Australia has a chance of meeting our greatest challenges – shifting the economy to net zero, building homes for a growing nation, keeping pace with warp-speed digital advances, and caring for an ageing population – is creating a more highly skilled workforce.

We will need an additional 30,000 electricians by 2030 for the net zero transition alone. According to Jobs and Skills Australia, the individual tasks that make up our jobs will change by 18 per cent every decade.

The gaps between what skills and knowledge we need and what we have in various industries are staggering and cannot be ignored. Amid this, we are falling behind on education standards for foundational skills and retention rates for high school students. Let alone the gaps that will appear with new technologies.

There are many potential solutions. Meeting our growing and evolving labour market needs will require policy interventions at every input point – from early education to skilled migration.

Most importantly, we must get better at giving our own people new skills.

Though the government continues to make investments in the public vocational and educational training sector and is undertaking significant reforms of higher education, we will not be able to build the skilled workforce we need if Australia’s businesses aren’t playing a central role too.

Australian companies partner with educational providers to make sure training programs actually match the real-world skills and knowledge they need, and the emerging demands they see on the horizon. That is why close business consultation is a must.

Industry is a key player in our lifelong learning ecosystem, providing opportunities for workers to upskill and reskill throughout their careers and stay competitive in the jobs market.

This workplace training is where large businesses truly excel, and where they must be recognised, valued and incentivised for their contributions to our national skills pipeline.

You only need to look to apprentice completion rates to see how effective Australia’s largest businesses are at taking Australians from “go to pro” in any given skill area. These businesses have about 90 per cent completion rates in their training courses, compared to the national average of about 50 per cent.

About 90 per cent of large businesses have also partnered with universities and VET providers to integrate learning programs into their work, compared to about 30 per cent of small and medium businesses.

And that learning is, for the most part, industry agnostic, so employees can take it with them to other workplaces, making them more competitive in the employment market. That means they are better set up to earn more and be able to transition to other industries throughout their careers. According to our survey of BCA members, at least 60 per cent of their workforce training is nationally understood and transferable across industries.

Cutting-edge, timely and future-focused training and education is happening in Australia’s largest employers, and if we are to meet our great national skills challenge, we must encourage more of it.

There are plenty of opportunities to do so. One glaring one is to properly support and incentivise all businesses for the vital role they play in training apprentices and trainees.

The Business Council of Australia is advocating for Australia to build on this great success area and boost the pipeline of qualified workers in essential trades, by redeveloping the Australian Apprenticeship Incentive System. Training apprentices is hard and costly, but many businesses are excellent at it and will do more of it if we maintain and strengthen apprentice employer incentives.

What is more, recent history shows that when government has increased employer apprentice incentives, the result has been increased commencements and completions.

We can also greatly expand the scope for formally recognising the skills and training provided for employees by their workplaces.

Australia can and should formally recognise industry micro-credentials and other short courses, making them recorded, rewarded and stackable within the Australian Qualifications Framework.

Businesses have their fingers on the pulse of business needs, so micro-credentials and short courses developed out of businesses will always be quicker to market and more targeted than traditional formal qualifications. This will be particularly important if we are to develop skills in clean energy, digital and cyber.

Government does not need to go it alone on the great Australian skills challenge. Australia’s leading businesses have the will to skill Australian talent – it is time to unlock that potential.