Nine in 10 IT jobs are outside the traditional tech industry, according to new research by Oracle Academy and Burning Glass Technologies. Beyond Tech: The Rising Demand for IT Skills in Non-Tech Industries, is the third in a series of reports examining how the demand for computer science skills is spreading throughout the job market. Burning Glass Technologies analyzed its database of more than 1 billion current and historical job postings to identify the computer science skills employers demand in a wide range of occupations. Key findings from the report include: · IT jobs are large and growing — especially outside of the tech industry. In 2018 there were 6.9 million online IT job openings, accounting for 24% of all online job openings. The vast majority of openings, 89%, were in non-tech industries. Between 2013–2018, IT job growth in the tech sector was 40%; outside of tech, IT job growth jumped 65%. · IT jobs are in high demand across the non-tech sector. The professional services, manufacturing, and financial services industries are the largest in terms of absolute demand for IT jobs, accounting for about half of all IT openings in the non-tech sector. But many industries with the smallest absolute number of IT jobs actually have large proportions of IT job openings. The utilities industry, for example, accounts for 1% of all non-tech IT jobs, but IT jobs constitute 35% of all job openings in the industry. · IT jobs in non-tech industries are more accessible than in the tech sector, making them strong entry-points into careers in IT. In the tech sector, 89% of IT jobs require at least a bachelor’s degree, compared to 76% in non-tech industries. Similarly, there are also greater opportunities for entry-level workers to begin their IT careers outside of tech: 29% of openings in non-tech industries request two years of work experience or less, compared with only 16% in tech. · IT careers are highly lucrative across sectors. IT jobs both in and out of the tech sector pay substantially more than non-IT jobs, with salary premiums of $20,000 or more. The estimated lifetime earnings of IT workers, regardless of industry, greatly exceed those of non-IT workers or minimum-wage workers. On average, IT workers can make 19% more than non-IT workers, or $802,129 over the course of a career. That number soars to 600%, or $4,361,355, when measuring the lifetime earning difference between minimum-wage workers and IT workers. The report can be found at https://burning-glass.com/research-projects/beyond-tech.

In the United States of America, approximately one in ten adults — nearly 36 million people — lack basic literacy and numeracy skills, while 27 million adults lack a high school diploma. Federally funded adult basic skills programs, such as Adult Basic Education (ABE) and Adult Secondary Education (ASE) courses, have traditionally served the educational needs of low-skilled adults. However, these programs have struggled to help undereducated adults transition into postsecondary education and the workforce. Over the last decade, new models for adult education have emerged that integrate basic skills education with workforce and college-readiness training. These integrated programs show new promise for increasing the academic and labor market successes of low-skilled adults — and they have been catching on across the country. With one of the nation’s largest educational systems, California provides a unique environment for studying these trends. State leaders have been highly active in developing career pathway models that integrate academic and workforce training in their K-12 and workforce sectors; however, less is known about how these programs are being integrated into adult basic skills education. With support from The James Irvine Foundation, MDRC researchers conducted phone interviews and site visits with 39 adult basic skills programs and leaders throughout California to learn more about the state’s programming and offerings. This report analyzes the need for adult basic skills programming across the state of California, the status of programs in high-need areas, and promising models that integrate workforce and college-readiness training with adult basic skills education. This report makes clear that The Irvine Foundation’s priority regions, including the San Joaquin Valley and the Salinas Valley as well as Riverside and San Bernardino counties, have some of the highest concentrations of undereducated and impoverished adults in the state, accounting for over one-fourth of the state’s low-skilled adult populations. Additionally, adult basic skills programming in these regions is still recovering from severe budget cutbacks in 2008 to 2012, when many programs were forced to close or dramatically reduce their enrollments due to the Great Recession. As a result, many programs focused more on rebuilding their core offerings and less on integrating adult basic skills instruction with workforce and college-readiness services. MDRC researchers were able to identify 10 programs in the priority regions and across the state that had integrated basic skills education with workforce and college preparation. A relatively limited number of programs existed within the state’s traditional ABE and ASE programs, so programs in other sectors such as workforce development are also highlighted. The report reveals that several opportunities exist for strengthening the development of these programs within adult basic skills schools, building on the lessons learned from promising programs in California. It also sets forth key incentives and structured learning opportunities for expanding integrated adult basic skills programs on a larger scale in California — and beyond.

About 13 percent of Canadian workers have skills mismatched to their jobs. Although this is somewhat in line with an average of around 10 percent among OECD countries in an international survey, Canadian policymakers have two reasons for concern. Firstly, there is significant variation across socioeconomic groups. While workers with higher educational attainment are more likely to be over-skilled, women, immigrants, and older workers are more likely to be under-skilled for their jobs. In the case of immigrants, the under-skilled problem entirely disappears with time spent in Canada, highlighting the importance of settlement policies that provide rigorous and accessible skills training, language programs, and job-search workshops for newcomers. Secondly, these results could worsen in the years ahead in the face of technological development and demographic aging that are occurring in the labour market at the same time as the role of newcomers in Canada’s labour force is growing. As it is, the majority of workers across occupations need to use cognitive skills such as literacy, numeracy, and problem solving at least once a week at work. More importantly, there is no occupation where these skills are not required at all. This study’s results highlight the importance of providing more opportunities for skills development and lifelong learning for all workers and better addressing individual training needs, particularly, among underskilled people such as older workers and new immigrants. Businesses – in addition to providing training opportunities for under-skilled workers – can reduce mismatches within their organizations by appropriately reassigning tasks, providing relocation assistance and finding innovative ways to use workers’ skills in order to optimize productivity. Governments can help reduce skills mismatch with policies that enhance labour market flexibility, ease labour mobility, and more importantly, increase participation in lifelong learning.

Australia's Tech Future details how Australia can maximise the opportunities of technological change by focusing on four key areas: People: developing Australia's digital skills and leaving no one behind; Services: how government can better deliver digital services; Digital assets: building infrastructure and providing secure access to high quality data; The enabling environment: maintaining our cyber security and reviewing our regulatory systems. Under each of these elements, the agenda sets clear outcomes, identifies opportunities and areas that need further focus, and outlines corresponding Government plans of action., The changing demand for skills will transform some jobs Australians have relied on for decades. The key challenge is for Australians to build the skills necessary to evolve with jobs as they change, and as new ones are created. Australian businesses success depends on the skills of their workforce. Access to skills and technologies will enable Australia's existing industries to stay competitive, new industries to emerge, and our labour market to be flexible and diverse.

Cedefop research shows that automation and artificial intelligence do not necessarily destroy, but rather transform jobs. People, businesses and labour markets will have to adapt and acquire new skills, enabling them to cooperate with machines. Education and training provision will have to offer 'robot-compatible' skills and competences, blending specific occupational skills with key competences such as entrepreneurship and learning to learn. Political decision makers must determine how to frame this continuing transformation, ensuring that nobody is left behind as new work methods are introduced.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here and is having a major impact on the jobs market and how we all work. This report argues that Australia has a choice: to benefit from this major industrial transformation, or let it wash over us as a country and see the majority of the benefits go to overseas companies and workers. Ignoring or resisting the technological change of AI will only disadvantage Australian workers. Governments have a vital role to play to ensure the benefits of AI are shared broadly across all sectors of our society. The report outlines a number of recommendations to ensure Australia rightly takes advantage of the opportunities in front of us. We recommend nationally coordinated investments and focus on education, regulation, security, and research and development, to ensure the future of work for all Australians is rewarding, safe and just.

A crisis of human capital today is keeping millions of Americans from the opportunity to earn a good life. Employers' growing demand for skilled, well-paid workers is unmet, because - outside of the four-year college degree - postsecondary education is not sufficiently connected to the modern workplace. It is an industrial-era model failing to deliver in the digital age. Apprenticeships are a fitting solution to this problem - they allow workers to earn while they learn and provide skilled training inextricably driven by employer demand. For employers, apprenticeships provide a better-trained, more reliable workforce. For workers, apprenticeships allow them to make multiyear investments in their future with the clarity of good-paying jobs at the finish. Apprenticeships should be the centerpiece of a skills training system in our evolving, modern economy. But a surprisingly few 50,000 Americans officially complete apprenticeships each year. Apprenticeship America would disrupt the current model of workforce training, quickly scaling to 1 million official completions per year. Apprenticeship America will follow our successful public university model - in scale and ambition - by establishing a flagship Apprenticeship Institute in every state. Collectively equipped with $40 billion in federal funding, Institutes will launch new apprenticeship programs and guide apprentices to success by functioning as hubs: proactively engaging employers, workers, technical colleges, unions, and other organizations that make apprenticeships work. A new, subsidized Federal Apprenticeship Loan will provide the incentive to small- and medium-sized employers to join the 50-state Institute system and to train and hire more apprentices. An upgraded, streamlined apprenticeship body within the Department of Labor will oversee the new system and collect outcomes data to ensure program quality.

This report provides an analysis of data on training package skill sets uses data from the National Register of VET and the National Provider Collection – Total VET activity. Training package skill sets are composed of one or more units of competency from a training package and are designed to meet licensing or regulatory requirements, or a defined industry need. The report identifies how much nationally recognised training package or training package skill set activity is occurring and where. The report indicates that activity is clustered around only a small number of skill sets and a small number of training packages.

Jobs Queensland has been tasked by the Queensland Government to undertake research and provide advice on future skills needs. The Anticipating Future Skills project, which entails the economic modelling of future scenarios, is one of the ways in which Jobs Queensland is performing this work. The scenarios used in this project were devised after a series of workshops with Jobs Queensland stakeholders across the state and cover the following themes: (1) Technological change: increasing labour productivity of all industries in Queensland so that the productivity of each is 0.25 per cent higher than the baseline annually between 2017-18 and 2021-22; (2) Changing workforce: increasing interstate migration with a decreasing proportion of working-age population; (3) External impact: halving the price of coal and iron ore. A baseline scenario to 2022 was also produced, based on 2017 labour market, population and economic data, and the Queensland Government's 2017-18 Budget Papers. This report is intended to present an overview of the Anticipating Future Skills project and high-level modelling results. The data presented represents only a portion of the modelling that has been undertaken for this project. Summaries for each region and industry are published at the back of this document.