The Skill Profile

Traditional notions of primary industry labour requirements centre around notions of skilled farmers and professionals and a generally unskilled workforce. The actual evidence is strongly at variance with those notions and presents a complex picture of a highly skilled workforce with a strong seasonal labour force that is increasingly required to have a wider range of work skills.

The workforce is also largely structured around a strong services sector that provides an array of services from professional, to agribusiness, to technical, to trade and a whole host of what are currently termed semi-skilled services. Services such as nutrition support, water management, crop management and aquatic health systems have developed in response to regulatory and market based changes as well as better farm management systems and improved technology.

The impact has been felt at all levels with changes in work organisation creating a new and modern farm worker with multiple skills that encompass such things as environmental management, sustainable practices, animal health management, quality systems, cold chain management as well as the more common task skills of crop or stock management.

Structural changes are also increasingly evident in many primary industry sectors as there is a general shift from small family units to larger more intensive and often corporate structures. Such changes have resulted in two distinct workforce directions, specialisation and contracting of services and the development of multi-skilled workers, often high technology based.

The recording and reporting of skill changes by the ABS has failed to keep pace with these changes and both ASCO and ANZCO have perpetuated old notions of work in primary industries by adhering to occupational definitions that are either no longer relevant or at inappropriate skill levels.

As primary industry sectors tend to have an entirely different profile to manufacturing or trade based industries, a lack of declared vocations in primary industries has been interpreted as symptomatic of a generally low skilled industry sector. The result has been that most occupations outside of a narrow range of professional and technical occupations have been considered by the ABS as semi-skilled at best. This has had a serious impact on migration policy for primary industries and effectively removed many occupations from consideration under the skills in demand listings.

There is an urgent need to review the occupational classification methodology and definitions, which apply to primary industry workers.

There are two principal labour needs in primary industries, full time and seasonal labour. Seasonal labour is more commonly associated with the horticulture and commercial fishing sectors but is also an important requirement for the State’s grain, wool and viticulture industries.

Early research findings show that seasonal labour numbers are generally below current harvest requirements in all regions with shortages most pronounced in viticulture, stone fruits, citrus and commercial fishing. The actual shortages vary considerably both between regions and within regions and there is no single source that effectively records all seasonal labour requirements. The growing level of seasonal labour shortages is nonetheless disturbing and will require improved seasonal labour requirement reporting to better target support measures.

Some recent amendments to working holiday visas have clearly assisted the process of securing harvest personnel but the additional labour is seen as a short term benefit given deeper structural change issues.

Full-time labour requirements are spread across the industry at all levels and are especially marked in farm management and professional occupational areas. Some professional and technical occupations such as agronomists and occupational divers are already in severe shortage.

The South Australian primary industries sector has an emerging skills issue as well as a labour issue. The rapid development of technology in modern farming systems and significant changes in many workplaces have resulted in new skills sets that embody a greater range of occupational skills, a greater mix of skill levels and especially the adoption of a range of risk management skills. Many of these have arisen out of the market demand for efficient production systems. The skills requirements of modern primary industry workers have also in many cases overtaken the capability of the training market to deliver, especially in specialist fields, some high tech operations and risk management fields.