Last week’s column showed that healthcare and education were the two industries that saw the strongest job growth since the start of the pandemic.

I made the argument that, while essential for the longevity of the country, these two industries are not driving the economy directly. Regular readers of this column will also be familiar with the fact that, despite high migration rates, Australia is fast running out of workers.

With this in mind let’s look at the same employment data but cut it by occupation type. Which jobs have seen the most growth since February 2020?

We will also look at pre-pandemic benchmarks to see just how radical the shift towards health jobs really was. Have a look at the data yourself first before we walk through it together.

Our eyes instantly went to the top of the table. Aged and disabled carers were by far the fastest growing job. In only about five years, we added 115,000 workers.

Growing a workforce by 52 per cent in such a short time is a tall order. The sector is massively understaffed, pay is modest, and the wave of Baby Boomers needing aged care hasn’t even started yet.

In the coming 15 years we need to roughly double the number of aged and disabled carers in the system. This means we need to keep the current increase of around 23,000 workers per year running for the next 15+ years. Let’s be blunt: this won’t happen.

Aged care as it functions today will not function once Baby Boomers reach their mid-80s. Systemic change is the only way forward to ensure all Baby Boomers receive the care they deserve.

Nine of the 20 fastest growing jobs were in health and education. Our national demographic profile means we will see even more demand for these industries. Who is going to fill these jobs? Pay isn’t going to motivate people to work as a carer, nurse, educator, or welfare worker.

The motivation to take up care or education jobs comes from within, comes from a desire to help other people.

Nobody goes into these sectors because they are after the big bucks. As the cost of living crisis, high house prices, and high interest rates persist people will make pragmatic career decisions.

Being a teacher would be nice, but as there are plenty of jobs available in industries that pay better young Australians will make very pragmatic career choices. This means staffing our schools, hospitals, and aged care facilities will become ever harder.

Overall, we grew our workforce by 12 per cent (or 1.6 million jobs) since the start of the pandemic. As we got used to more online shopping and food delivery services, we employed more logistic workers and delivery drivers.

As working from home rose in popularity, more programmers and other IT specialists were needed.

How do these recent trends compare with pre-pandemic jobs trends? We didn’t grow our workforce at the same rate (only increased by 10 per cent).

This means we only needed to add 1.2 million instead of 1.6 million workers. This saw the unemployment rate fall. The composition of jobs before the pandemic was also different. Only four of the top 20 jobs were in health or education.

We transitioned the Australian economy towards more office-based jobs and needed heaps more clerks and office managers helping with administrative tasks, built up human resource functions, and added PR and sales jobs.

Our national obsession with lifestyle also shone through. Waiters and chefs were needed in record numbers as we hung out in cafes and restaurants.

Before the pandemic we still saw construction-related jobs such as construction managers and architectural workers enter the top 20. The lull in new building commencements since Covid pushed these construction-related jobs out of the top 20.

The beast that is the Australian economy keeps demanding more new jobs while we run out of young people able to fill these openings. Looking at the demand for new jobs, I am very confident that no plausible government in our near future (say a decade or so) would significantly lower migration intake.

Assume around 250,000 net new migrants coming into Australia each year. This is the average intake over the last decade and a half.

Since workers will be increasingly hard to come by, we must be strategic about how many workers we create locally and who we import from overseas.

I would want our education system to be more aligned with the needs of our economy. We are sending about half of our year 12 students to university. That is probably too high considering the shortage in care jobs.

I would tighten entrance criteria for university while making TAFE more accessible.

Fee-free TAFE seems a good first step. I would like to see a higher share of the visas we hand out going to skilled migrants. I’d also appreciate a higher number of employer sponsored visas.

Even with those changes, workers would remain a rare resource and investments into AI, automation, and robotics are needed to ensure we make the existing workers more productive.

 Simon Kuestenmacher is a co-founder of The Demographics Group. His columns, media commentary and public speaking focus on current socio-demographic trends and how these impact Australia. His podcast, Demographics Decoded, explores the world through the demographic lens. Follow Simon on Twitter (X), Facebook, or LinkedIn.