The Australian jobs on the rise, and the ones disappearing

The nature of how and where we work is changing.

Some industries are losing workers and other types of jobs are gaining more workers.

In a previous post demographer Simon Kuestenmacher explained how Australia's population is aging.

That's one of the reasons why the largest job growth in Australia came from aged, or disabled, carers.

And there was also significant growth amongst professional, scientific and technical services.

In a recent column in The New Daily, Simon Kuestenmacher explored the changing composition of our workforce which indicate which industries are about to die and which are about to thrive.

Caring boom

The establishment of the National Disability Insurance Scheme played into this growth.

We grew the crucial cohort of care workers from 132,300 in 2016 to 227,500 in 2021.

That's a massive growth of 95,200 workers (or 72 per cent).

Simon shared his insights in his The New Daily column:

"Australia added a net of 52 new workers every day in the care sector for half a decade.

No other job comes even close to such a growth rate.

The bad news is that the ageing of Australia’s population has only started and the next 15 years will see even bigger growth.

Australia must somehow find even more care workers.

This is a challenge of a monumental scale and will define the quality of retirement for the whole Baby Boomer generation."

AI Automation

Taken together, all professions containing the word “manager” grew by 29 per cent.

That’s more than twice as high as the overall job growth of 13 per cent from 2016 to 2021.

Mr Kuestenmacher explained:

"Considering advances in technology and management software, as well as the emergence of innovative organisational structures like DAOs (decentralised autonomous organisations) businesses might be able to operate with fewer managerial positions in the future.

We can reasonably argue that middle-managerial tasks are at a very high risk of being automated in the future.

Lots of jobs grow at around the same rate as the Australian population and hence make an appearance the top 25 list.

Teachers, teachers’ aides, general clerks, retail workers in general, and tradies are good examples.

Overall, jobs in professional services (think anyone in office wear typing away on a laptop) and healthcare saw a huge boom – not just in the last five years but over the last decades."

Shrinking secretary pool

Receptionists and secretaries are the two highest-profile white-collar jobs that are melting away.

Mr Kuestenmacher further explained:

"The tasks that receptionists and secretaries performed were partially taken over by software (calendar management software, bosses learnt how to type).

The professions then transformed and rebranded themselves as executive assistants.

This led to a collective upskilling and improved pay. Automating tasks performed by secretaries ended up being a net positive for these workers.

Other jobs just died because technology made them redundant or replaced them with similar jobs.

We can afford to have 13,400 fewer taxi drivers because Uber entered the picture."

The bottom line

Job losses don’t always stem from a lack of need for a profession but rather from a lack of available workers.

Mr Kuestenmacher said:

"We lost international students and backpackers, who frequently held jobs in retail and hospitality, during the pandemic.

Like in any dataset, we yet again see the pandemic reflected clearly too.

The list of job losses and gains truly provides a good snapshot of the big-picture trends we’ve seen in the workforce."

About Joseph Ballota Joseph is a Property Coach who put hundreds of people on the road towards wiping away their mortgage in under 5 years through expert Property Investment Plans.