In a regional hospital emergency department, a vacant nursing position can mean longer wait times. On a construction site, a missing electrician can delay an entire project. In a childcare centre, one unfilled role can force families to stay home from work. These problems may seem unrelated, but Australia’s labour market data suggests they share the same cause.
Australia is projected to create nearly 1.95 million jobs by 2035. That sounds like unambiguously good news. But look more closely at which jobs are growing and who is available to fill them, and a more unsettling picture emerges.
The occupations expected to grow fastest over the next decade are not drawn evenly from across the economy. They are concentrated in health, education, construction, and professional services the very sectors where Australia has consistently struggled to recruit for years. The shortages employers report today are not a temporary disruption waiting to be resolved by a growing economy. The data suggests the opposite: as the economy grows, the gap between available jobs and available workers may widen.
This is Australia’s skills shortage paradox. The country is successfully creating jobs. It is not successfully creating enough qualified people to fill them.
Professionals alone are projected to add more than 845,000 workers by 2035 — the single largest contribution of any occupation group. Community and Personal Service Workers, which includes nurses, aged care staff, and childcare workers, will add more than 236,000. Technicians and Trades Workers are projected to grow by nearly 196,000.
These numbers invite optimism. But the picture of where growth is concentrated should give pause. These are not entry-level roles that any job-seeker can step into without preparation. They are heavily credentialled occupations in sectors that already struggle to recruit. The question is not whether the jobs will exist. It is whether the workers will.
5 of the top 15 occupations projected to add the most workers between 2025 and 2035 already carry a shortage classification. This is not a coincidence of sectoral timing. It is a structural feature of the Australian labour market. The roles that society most needs to fill nurses, teachers, engineers, construction tradespeople — are the same roles that employers have been unable to recruit for years.
The pattern also reveals something important about the nature of shortage occupations. These are not low-skill, easily substituted roles. They are credentialled professions requiring years of training, and in many cases, formal registration. Creating more of these jobs does not, by itself, produce more people qualified to fill them.
Key finding: The red bubbles — occupations with national shortage status — are not clustered on the left where declining jobs would sit. They appear across the right side of the chart, among Australia’s fastest-growing occupations. Registered Nurses, Physiotherapists, General Practitioners, Early Childhood Teachers, Electricians, Civil Engineers, and Construction Managers all carry shortage status while simultaneously being projected to grow. Australia is not growing out of these shortages. It is growing deeper into them.
For a university student choosing a degree, or a school leaver deciding between TAFE and university, this chart contains a direct signal. The occupations that will be most in demand over the next decade are already the hardest ones for employers to fill. Career investment in these fields is not a gamble it is a response to one of the most consistent patterns in Australia’s labour market data.
The pattern of shortage is not uniform. New South Wales and Victoria dominate in raw vacancy numbers, as population size would suggest. But when intensity is measured relative to each state’s own labour market, a more revealing picture emerges.
Western Australia shows disproportionate pressure in Technicians and Trades a direct consequence of sustained demand from the resources and construction sectors. Queensland shows elevated Community and Personal Service vacancy intensity, consistent with its growing aged care and disability support caseload. The Northern Territory, with a small but structurally significant labour market, shows professional vacancy intensity that reflects the persistent challenge of attracting qualified workers to remote settings.
For a young person in regional Australia weighing whether to train as an electrician, a nurse, or an engineer, this geographic pattern matters. The shortage is not only a city problem. It runs through every state and territory, concentrated differently but present everywhere.
Key finding: The workers Australia needs most are not automatically the workers it currently has. Workers without post school qualifications are concentrated in lower skill occupations Skill Levels 4 and 5 while 45% of qualified workers hold roles at Skill Level 1. The qualification gap is not a minor disadvantage. It is the structural mechanism through which large parts of the workforce are excluded from the fastest growing and hardest to fill jobs in the country.
The dumbbell chart makes the divide impossible to ignore. At Skill Level 1 the degree-level professions driving most of Australia’s projected job growth — 45% of qualified workers are employed, compared to just 13% of those without a qualification. At Skill Level 5, the pattern reverses sharply: 30% of unqualified workers are in the lowest skill occupations, compared to just 8% of qualified workers.
This is not simply a story about individual choice or effort. It is a structural feature of how Australia’s labour market is organised. Moving from a lower skill occupation into a shortage classified professional role requires years of training, often at significant financial cost, with uncertain access to pathways depending on geography, age, and prior education. For a career changer in their 30s or 40s, or for a worker in a regional area without access to a university, the barrier is not motivation — it is the absence of an accessible, affordable route.
The five charts in this article describe a labour market under a specific kind of pressure not the pressure of too few jobs, but the pressure of the wrong jobs in the wrong places, filled by workers who may not yet have the qualifications to do them.
Australia will create nearly two million new jobs by 2035. The economy will expand. Demand for labour will rise. None of that is in doubt. What is in doubt is whether a sufficient number of Australians will hold the right credentials, in the right occupations, in the right parts of the country, to meet that demand.
The evidence assembled here suggests that without deliberate structural intervention in training capacity, in recognition of overseas qualifications, in geographic access to education, and in career transition pathways the shortages of today will become the structural deficits of tomorrow.
For students, the implication is clear: credentials in health, engineering, construction trades, and education represent some of the most resilient career investments available. For policymakers, the data points to where intervention is needed most not in stimulating job creation, but in building the pipeline of qualified workers that those jobs require. For employers, it is a warning: the labour market will not correct itself simply by growing.
Whether Australia remains the lucky country may depend less on how many jobs it creates, and more on whether people can access the skills pathways needed to fill them.
The question is no longer only whether Australia can create jobs. It is whether Australia can create the workers those jobs require.
References
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2025). Education and work, Australia, May 2025 (Cat. No. 6227.0). ABS. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/education/education-and-work-australia/may-2025
Jobs and Skills Australia. (2025). Employment projections — May 2025 to May 2035. Australian Government. https://www.jobsandskills.gov.au/data/employment-projections
Jobs and Skills Australia. (2025). 2025 Unit Group Shortage List — 4 digit ANZSCO. Australian Government. https://www.jobsandskills.gov.au/data/skills-shortages-analysis
Jobs and Skills Australia. (2026). Internet vacancies by ANZSCO 4-digit occupations, states and territories — April 2026. Australian Government. https://www.jobsandskills.gov.au/data/internet-vacancy-index