Service Skills Australia
Once every two years, we at Service Skills Australia invite our stakeholders to participate in a national conference to discuss the skills development issues affecting the tourism and hospitality, sport and recreation, and wholesale, retail and personal services sectors. Our 2010 conference was held from 1-2 March 2010 at the Sydney Convention Centre. We were joined by over 200 representatives of industry, vocational education and training, government and unions over the two days, and heard from a wide-range of thought-provoking speakers.
The theme of the conference was “Focusing on a positive future”, aimed at exploring how we can tackle the challenges that lie ahead to ensure the prosperity of the service industries into the future.
Our first day focused on the workforce with the Minister for Employment Participation Mark Arbib opening the conference and drawing our attention to future forecasts like the ageing population, and impending growth in construction and natural resources sectors, and how that will inevitably reduce the number of workers available to the service industries. Chris Helder helped us from a personal and organisational perspective and showed us how we can choose to create positive mindsets, then Julie Sloan explored the concept of workforce planning and drew the audience’s attention to the transition from planning to development and the framework required to build workforce planning into business practice.
On the afternoon of day one of the conference, we hosted a panel discussion facilitated by Jenny Brockie to explore the topic – Get A Real Job: the perception of the service industries. The discussion was lively and it seems that even getting our diverse industry stakeholders to agree on the perception of their industries is difficult. The reality of the service industries is that they can provide diverse and challenging long term careers, yet this is not fully understood by the public, parents, jobseekers and careers advisors – our challenge in the coming years is to work collaboratively to correct this perception so that the service industries have access to the right number of skilled workers to ensure its future success.
At the 2010 Gala Dinner, we presented two awards the Industry Skills Council Award for Contribution to Skills Development to Westfield and Woolworths, and the Industry Skills Council Award for Contribution to Skills Excellence, to the five World Skills trainers who coached and mentored our successful Service Industries Skillaroos. These awards are our attempt to recognise those contributors who are often invisible partners in the success of RTO’s and individuals in the VET sector.
On day two, our Chair Justin Scarr summarised our conference journey and deftly wove in some strategic views on where he felt we should be heading. Robin Shreeve (CEO Skills Australia) gave an insight into the national workforce development strategy to be launched by the Government on 5 March, and Barry McGaw provided a snapshot of the progress on a project that is about the skills required for teaching and assessment of 21st century skills. From my perspective it was really interesting to see how assessment and its evidence or measurement is being enhanced by advances in technology. Finally, Mark McCrindle gave us an energising and motivating snapshot of the social and consumer trends and gave us some insights on what might happen in the future.
So far, the feedback to the conference has been overwhelmingly positive. The conference is a wonderful opportunity for the representatives and stakeholders of these important and significant industries that represent over ¼ of the workforce to get together and share knowledge, insights and solutions. We look forward to meeting again in 2012.
Find out more about all Service Skills Industries here