Skills Australia

• Skills Australia will provide the Australian Government with independent, high quality advice to assist better targeting of support for the skills and workforce development needs of businesses and workers across the country.
• Skills Australia will play a central role in analysing emerging skills needs and demands across industry sectors.  Specifically, Skills Australia will help identify:
• future skills needs, so they can be addressed before they negatively impact on economic activity
• persistent skills shortages, so that current capacity blockages can be overcome
• barriers that prevent skills formation in areas where persistent skills shortages exist
• industries where retraining and up skilling of workers may be required to prevent  unemployment, under-employment and skills obsolescence.
• Skills Australia will assist the Government deliver on its commitment to provide an additional 630,000 training places over five years from 2008.  The new places will be delivered through the national training system with industry need and advice at its heart and ensuring that training is more responsive to the needs of businesses and individuals.

The functions of Skills Australia include:

• analysing current and emerging skills needs across industry sectors
• assessing evidence from commissioned research and industry stakeholders to inform Australia’s skills and workforce development needs
• distributing information from research and consultations with stakeholders widely to enable entrepreneurs, businesses and workers to have the necessary information to inform their training and employment decisions
• providing Government with recommendations on current and future skills needs to help inform Government decisions to encourage skills formation and drive ongoing reforms to the education and training sector, including on priorities for the investment of public funds
• establishing and maintaining relationships with relevant state bodies to inform advice on current and future demands for skills and facilitate alignment of priorities for responses to skills needs.

Further information is available on the Skills Australia   website.