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.”
Aaron Hill
ANZ Economic Insights Lead & MD, Accenture Strategy
“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.”
Hamish Ride
Nous Group, Principal
