Assessing what jobs and skills will be in demand over the coming years is a key focus of the National Skills Commission.

While we have found that there will be a wide range of jobs growth across industries, job types and skill levels, the most growth will be in service industries and in jobs requiring higher skills.

The NSC’s five-year employment projections show four service industries accounting for almost two-thirds of employment growth to November 2025. That said, future employment growth is not confined to these areas. Jobs growth is projected across a range of industries.

Our five-year employment projections show very strong employment growth for professionals (up by 439,500 or 13.2%) and community and personal service workers (up by 186,400 or 14.6%).

This reflects the strong growth expected in the service industries that are the leading employers of workers in these occupational groups. Together, these two occupational groups are expected to account for more than 60% of total employment growth over the next five years.

At a more detailed level, the jobs projected to have the largest increases in employment are aged and disabled carers, registered nurses and software and applications programmers.

Occupations expected to see lower employment growth face ongoing challenges, such as from technological change. Some of these occupations are from the clerical and administrative workers groups, where work is routine and susceptible to automation. These include secretaries, retail managers and personal assistants.

One of the most telling findings from an analysis of the NSC’s five-year projections is the importance of education and training. Of the near 1 million jobs that the NSC expects to be created over the five years to November 2025, more than nine out of 10 of those jobs will require a post-secondary school qualification.

The NSC is also looking at the skills needed to do the jobs that we project will grow.

The Australian Skills Classification (ASC) is a new tool which takes 600 jobs and identifies the skills that make up those jobs.

These skills fall into three groups:

• core skills which every job requires. For example, digital engagement, problem-solving, and communicating with one another
• technology skills
• specialist skills – which are specific to a job.

Skills that are like one another are clustered together. The ASC groups 1925 specialist skills into 279 skills clusters. These are in turn grouped into 29 skills cluster families.

The figure below shows the expected growth across each skills cluster family over the next five years. The size of the bubbles represents the number of hours Australians currently spend on each skills family in a week. The large bubble on the far right is the ‘health and care’ skills family. This family is expected the see the largest increase in hours worked, although the ‘food services’ cluster family is projected to experience the fastest growth.

‘Computer and electronics’ and ‘performance evaluation and efficiency improvement’ are the next fastest growing families. Skills in these families are associated with many professional occupations.