Team Sydney

The continuing growth of Australia’s digital workforce has seen digital skills become essential across all industries, making traditional job classifications based on occupations increasingly unable to fully capture the skills required to perform a job role.

A way forward is to develop a flexible skills-based approach to describing job roles, which is better suited for today’s workplace.

To lead the debate the DSO worked with Accenture and the Nous Group, who analysed thousands of job advert data points, to create a skills based taxonomy across the whole workforce, covering ‘digital expert workers’ like computer programmers and ‘digital enabled workers’ like accountants.

This common set of skills-based job roles across the entire workforce establishes a structure through which to assess, monitor, and adapt to the changing needs of the labour market. Employees can develop a broad set of skills for a range of roles and industries, while employers benefit from a wider pool of candidates with transferable skills.

The taxonomy may be piloted with employers, who have been calling for a better way to describe their job roles and the needs of flexible teams.

“A flexible skills-based approach to describing job roles is much better suited to us and the way that we build multi-disciplinary teams. In our team at Accenture, we have a lot of economists, but we work with colleagues with a wide range of digital and non-digital skills that aren’t tied to their occupation.”

“The rapid adoption of digital skills beyond ICT roles requires us to discard preconceptions of who is a digital worker. The broad value of digital skills is rewriting the DNA of jobs today and will continue to do so in the future. This work is a critical step to ensuring any transitions are well managed.”

The speed at which technology is changing the way we work, learn, travel, get healthcare, and communicate with each other continues to accelerate. It took 16 years for mobile phones to reach 100 million users worldwide, while TikTok gained 100 million users in just nine months.

This trend highlights the urgent need for a reformed, agile VET sector that can keep pace with the speed of technological change. Recent breakthroughs in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) have brought this need into even sharper focus.

While Artificial Intelligence recognises patterns such as speech or pictures, GAI can generate all sorts of new text, music, and art within seconds. ChatGPT is the language generator that has received the most attention. It reached 100 million users just two months after its November 2022 launch.

GAI is already having a significant impact on training and the skills required in the workplace, providing a unique opportunity for VET to transform and lead the delivery of practical and just in time new skills that everybody will need.

“ChatGPT isn’t just challenging educational assessment, it’s transforming a lot of white-collar work that VET educates people for. It’s vital the DSO keeps the sector on top of these changes”

Demand for digital badges is experiencing rapid growth. According to the ‘Open Badge Count” report’* released in February 2023, the global use of digital badges has surged by 73 percent since 2020. Although specific figures for Australia are currently unavailable, it is probable the adoption of digital badges reflects the global trend.

Digital badges are particularly well-suited for microcredentials and shorter vocational training. These serve as online credentials that signify a learner’s accomplishments in a course or program, providing benefits to students, trainers, and employers. Students can showcase their skills, trainers can validate program quality, and employers can efficiently evaluate skills and qualifications. In the future, digital badges will become commonplace in job applications and included in digital resumes or portfolios.

Notably, the DSO Pilots with DESBT, Canberra Cyber Hub, and the Digital Confidence for Government Executive program, each offer digital badges, allowing participants to showcase their newly acquired skills by displaying their badges on LinkedIn.

Digital badges offer a promising solution to the challenges of assurance and presentation of credentials and skills recognition, through developing common standards, promoting recognition, and providing secure platforms. This benefits lifelong learning, skill development, and employability.

*Published by 1EdTech, a non-profit community of leading educational providers and Credential Engine, a centralised credential registry. A copy of the report is here.

“We’ve seen a significant increase in the use of digital badges and were pleased to work on a pilot with the DSO. Digital badging provides a convenient way for individuals to showcase their skills and achievements to potential employers and the broader community. It also increases recognition, credibility, and validation of an individual’s skills and accomplishments.”

“As the first Australian Digital Credentialing Agency, we are delighted to work with the DSO across digital credentialing strategies. As the only Australian provider to take part in the ‘Open Badge Count’, we agree that this need for credentials is growing globally, and specifically within the Australasian region. The future of life-long learning and assisting in the learner-to-work transition relies on the development of metadata standards that are interoperable across ecosystems. This is critical to maintaining a trusted source of truth and is something that we have worked on closely with the DSO.”