25 emerging roles changing Australia’s job market

New fields will require a new way of working

BY Rachel Ranosa 05 Jan 2021

The “skills of the future” are changing the jobs of today, but Australia is eager to get millions of workers ready for the massive shift, a recent survey of emerging jobs has revealed.

The National Skills Commission has unveiled 25 new occupations in seven categories that are in high demand across Australia and New Zealand.

“As the way we work changes, skill requirements also evolve,” the NSC said. “By identifying emerging skills and looking at how these skills change existing jobs, we are able to identify emerging or new jobs in the labour market.”

The current list of occupations is not yet the most exhaustive, but the data provide a glimpse of where the job market is headed.

The aim of the survey is to equip Australians with the right tools and skills, and to build a “skilled, resilient and adaptable workforce,” said the NSC, which plans to continue monitoring the trends.

“An advantage of our approach is access to real-time internet job advertisement data,” the commission said. The system can reportedly identify whenever a new occupation or field is gaining traction and generating employer demand.

But while certain occupations require a refresh of workers’ competencies, other jobs don’t exactly call for a radical overhaul of existing skills.

“For example, advances in the way we store and organise information mean we can more easily access a wider range of knowledge than in previous decades,” the NSC said.

“As a result, librarians spend less time dealing with the physical management and transport of information, and more time assisting people to understand how to access, understand and use that information.”

It’s different for other occupations, however. Traditional roles of the statistician, for instance, have changed so drastically that new fields – data science and data analytics – have branched off.

Which occupations are emerging in Australia?

1) Data analytics