Australia consistently undervalues ‘soft skills’ in the workplace. The Jobs Summit can change this

This week’s Jobs and Skills Summit makes for easy headlines. More jobs. More skills. More cooperation. Less blame. But delivering on expectations provides an enormous early hurdle for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his government.

The fact that we have a critical shortage of workers and specific skills is not in doubt. But what sort of skills do we need? How do we compete with other countries trying to lure workers from the same catchments? And how do we know what is the next challenge on the jobs front?

A couple of years ago, few were predicting the crisis we now see in teaching — with a massive shortfall in numbers, areas of expertise and even the make-up between male and female educators. Would you have believed Commonwealth modelling, five years ago, showing that by 2025 we would need 85,000 more nurses — and 123,000 by 2030?

And what about some of those predictions relating directly to employment that have not eventuated? Some economists only a handful of years ago were warning that 47% of all jobs would disappear. We were told two decades ago that the paperless office would upend our work, and that we’d be driven to work by AI.

How will this summit navigate the COVID-19 hill? Where will we source these predictions? What technologies will advance fastest? And what does Australia have to offer that will propel us ahead of Canada and America and a host of other nations facing the same economic problem?

Anthony Albanese says it’s about a “culture of cooperation” and he wants an end to the blame game. That sounds good, but it will not deliver teachers to classrooms, nurses to hospitals, workers to construction sites and technicians to labs.

Enterprise bargaining and broader industrial relations reform are crucial. Migration levels and how we adjust those are crucial. Providing a strategy that pivots and forecasts the shortages before they become critical is crucial.

But having clarity around the skills we need and the training to deliver them is paramount.

Take the example of the current crisis of care, where the shortages in the pink-collar workforce — nurses, teachers, childcare educators, aged and disability workers — are extreme. We need people who have the academic and physical skills to do those tasks.

Year 12s across the nation are beginning to focus on external exams, which will provide many with an ATAR ranking used to gain admission to different university courses. But many of the skills we are looking for — and this summit provides a wonderful opportunity to address — are not found on a physics paper or any apprenticeship on offer.

Imagine if we could use this crisis to disrupt education and training so that we also ensured the ironically called “soft skills” were given an increased priority.

An ATAR ranking doesn’t reflect teamwork. An apprenticeship doesn’t provide training in empathy. Leadership is ignored in the plethora of tests that universities now demand. So is time management, conflict resolution and having a stellar work ethic.

Perhaps communication is one of the most underrated skills of all. How does a health care professional communicate with a patient? A teacher with a student? A builder with his client? A banker with a mortgagee in distress?

The Times reported last week that the likely next British prime minister, Liz Truss, liked to set maths tests for civil servants at interviews: a question like what is a seventh minus an eighth?

But what does that prove? Nothing, as Greens Leader Adam Bandt made clear during the election campaign when he responded to a silly question about the current wage price index with: “Google it, mate.”

We’ve got to stop living in the past. We can’t keep repeating history. It’s easy to dismiss consideration of the “soft skills” because they are harder to mark. A jobs crisis can be fixed by plugging holes. And that might even lead to a few good headlines.

But is it a missed opportunity? And how could this summit be different to the 100 others that have been hosted in the same venue by a merry-go-round of leaders?

This article was first published by Crikey.