Job Openings and Replacement Rates by Occupation

The National Skills Commission produces employment projections to provide a guide to the likely future direction of the jobs market over the next five years. However, net change in employment is considerably lower than the number of jobs that will become available over the five-year projection period. Even if an occupation is projected to decline in employment, many job vacancies will still exist over the corresponding period.

In order to quantify the number of opportunities available in the labour market for a given occupation, the NSC has used data from the ABS Participation, Job Search and Labour Mobility (PJSM) supplementary survey to create occupational replacement rates, which estimate the share of employment in an occupation that will be replaced within a given year. These estimated replacement rates can provide insight into the labour market in a variety of ways explored in this paper.