I have watched more than one organisation spend a fortune hunting for a rare external expert while the person who could have done the job sat two desks away, bored and about to resign. The skills shortage is the growing mismatch between the skills employers need and the skills available to them, made worse by how fast those skills now expire. It is real, and a large part of it is self-inflicted.
This is the fifth article in my series on the seven management crises, and it follows the psychological health decline. Poor health drains a team’s capacity, and this crisis drains its capability. I want to make an argument that most talent strategies get backwards. The skills shortage is less a shortage of skilled people than a shortage of managers who grow them.
| The supply story | What the data shows | The shift that transforms |
|---|---|---|
| A hiring problemThe skills shortage is usually read as a hiring problem, solved by finding the finished expert somewhere out there. Read that way, it becomes an endless and expensive hunt with no finish line. | A moving targetSkills now expire faster than they can be hired, while the same roles sit unfilled because employers keep fishing in the same pond. The gap is structural, and it is partly self-made. | Grow, don’t just hireBenjamin Chaminade’s frame is appetite before skill. A manager who hires for learnability and builds a team’s learning velocity turns a shortage into a pipeline, and stops manufacturing the scarcity they complain about. |
What the skills shortage really is
The skills shortage is the mismatch between the skills employers need and the skills workers have available, driven by two forces at once. One is a genuine gap in supply, and the other is the accelerating expiry of skills people already hold. Seeing both is the difference between treating a symptom and treating the cause.
Defining the skills shortage
A skills shortage exists when employers cannot find enough people with the capabilities a role requires. In Australia the measure is concrete, an occupation counts as being in shortage when employers fill fewer than two-thirds of their vacancies. It shows up across highly specialised fields and ordinary trades alike.
The scale is documented. Jobs and Skills Australia found that around a third of assessed occupations were in national shortage in 2024, 303 out of 916, easing slightly from the year before as the labour market softened. The shortages are stubborn, persisting across years and concentrated in the same critical areas.
The persistence is the real warning. When the same occupations stay short year after year, despite decades of training reforms, the problem is not a temporary blip that more of the same will fix. It is structural, which means the response has to be structural too.
It also explains why the shortage feels different from the inside. A manager does not experience a third of all occupations, they experience one role they cannot fill and a team slowly falling behind, which is a more solvable problem than the macro number suggests.
Framed that way, the shortage stops being an abstraction and becomes a to-do list, the role in front of you and the learning your team is or is not doing.
The two engines: a gap and an expiry
The shortage runs on two engines, and most responses only address the first. There is the visible gap, the roles you cannot fill today, and there is the quieter expiry, the skills your existing people hold that are ageing out from under them.
The expiry is the part that changes the game. The World Economic Forum expects that around 39 per cent of workers’ core skills will change or become outdated by 2030, and that most of the workforce will need reskilling this decade. A skill you hire today is a depreciating asset, which makes buying alone a losing strategy.
This reframes the manager’s task entirely. If skills were durable, buying them once would settle the matter, and because they expire, the job is never done. Managing a skills shortage is therefore less like filling a bucket and more like tending a garden that keeps growing back.
Why AI and the green transition sharpen it
Two forces are turning a chronic shortage into an acute one: artificial intelligence moving from experiment into everyday workflows, and the green transition creating whole categories of work that barely existed a decade ago. Both change what a role needs faster than training can keep up.
AI does not simply remove jobs, it rewrites the skills inside the ones that remain, so a role can keep its title and lose half its content in a couple of years. The green transition pulls the other way, creating demand for skills in energy, efficiency and sustainability that the education pipeline has not caught up with. For a manager, the target keeps moving, and only a team built to keep learning can track it.
How the skills shortage shows up in Australia now
In Australia the shortage shows up in three ways a manager will recognise: in the specific occupations that stay unfilled, in the speed at which existing skills expire, and in the growing premium on human skills that no course reliably teaches. Each points to a different part of the response.
The three overlap, and it helps to hold them apart. The occupation gaps are a supply-and-attraction problem, the expiry is a development problem, and the human-skills premium is a hiring-and-culture problem, and reaching for the wrong one wastes the effort.
Where the shortages actually are
The gaps are not evenly spread. They cluster in care, education, transport, construction and health, the work that keeps the country running.
The list is specific. Jobs and Skills Australia’s top shortage occupations by employment size include aged and disabled carers, primary and secondary teachers, truck drivers and electricians, with technicians and trades workers the hardest-hit group overall. These are not niche roles, they are the backbone of the economy, and no amount of overseas recruitment fills them all.
Overseas recruitment helps and cannot carry the load. Many of these roles have no straightforward visa pathway, the global competition for the same skills is fierce, and the care and trades work that is shortest cannot be offshored. That leaves growing and keeping people as the lever most fully in your control.
The accelerating expiry of skills
Even fully staffed teams are quietly falling behind. As technology and the green transition reshape the work, the half-life of a skill keeps shrinking, so competence built a few years ago needs constant renewal to stay current.
Employers feel it directly. The World Economic Forum reports that nearly two-thirds of employers name the skills gap as the single biggest barrier to transforming their business, and that if the global workforce were a hundred people, fifty-nine would need training by 2030. Standing still is now the fastest way to fall behind.
The uncomfortable implication is that a fully staffed team can still be in trouble. If nobody is learning, the team’s collective skill is quietly depreciating even as the headcount stays flat, and the shortage arrives from the inside. Standing pat is a slow-motion version of the same crisis.
The lesson for a manager is to assume decay and plan for renewal, the way a good gardener assumes winter and plants for spring.
Researchers talk about the shrinking half-life of a skill, the time before half of what you knew is out of date. In fast-moving fields that window is now measured in a few years, which means part of a graduate’s training is dated before their first promotion.
The premium on human skills
As technical skills churn, the durable advantage shifts to human ones. The capabilities that keep their value are the ones that let a person keep learning and working well with others, whatever the tools of the day.
The evidence backs this up. Analytical thinking, resilience, flexibility, leadership, creative thinking, and curiosity and lifelong learning all sit near the top of the skills employers say are rising in value. These are exactly the capacities a good T-shaped expert-generalist carries, and exactly the ones a narrow hiring filter screens out.
These skills resist the usual fixes precisely because a two-day course cannot install them. Curiosity, resilience and analytical thinking grow through practice, feedback and a culture that rewards them, which puts them in a manager’s hands rather than a training vendor’s. That is inconvenient and also an opportunity.
This is why the T-shaped shape matters. Depth in one area gives credibility and breadth across others gives adaptability, and together they let a person move as the work moves, which is exactly what a fast-expiring skill landscape rewards.
Hiring for these skills also future-proofs the team. Technical requirements will keep turning over, and a curious, adaptable person survives every turn, which is why appetite and learnability belong at the centre of how you choose people.
Why hiring your way out does not work
Here is the uncomfortable part for a recruitment budget. You cannot buy your way out of a shortage of skills that expire, and the harder you try, the more you neglect the people who could have grown into the roles. Much of the shortage is manufactured by the very managers complaining about it.
That is a hard sentence, and it is meant to be. It is also the good news, because a problem you are helping to cause is a problem you have real power to change.
You cannot buy a skill that expires next year
Buying finished expertise is bailing a leaking boat. Because skills keep expiring, every external hire starts depreciating on day one, and a strategy built only on acquisition needs an endless supply of new hires to stay level. The maths never works in your favour.
There is a sunk-cost trap here as well. Having paid a premium for a specialist, an organisation is reluctant to admit the skill has dated, so it holds the role static while the world moves, which compounds the loss rather than cutting it.
The alternative is to change what you optimise for. Rather than chasing the person who already has the skill, you build a team that acquires skills quickly, which I think of as its learning velocity. A team that learns fast outperforms a team that was hired perfectly for a world that no longer exists.
A concrete comparison makes the point. Two teams start level, one hires a perfectly qualified specialist and stops there, the other hires a fast learner and keeps developing everyone. Two years on, the first team’s edge has expired with the technology, and the second has compounded. Velocity beats a one-off acquisition over any real horizon.
Extractive management manufactures its own shortage
This is the pattern I see most often, and it has a name I use, extractive management. It treats people as finished skill-sets to be used up rather than potential to be grown, so it hunts endlessly outside while its own talent stagnates and leaves.
The Australian data catches the behaviour in the act. Jobs and Skills Australia found that nearly three-quarters of employers kept advertising in the same places despite a year of unfilled vacancies, and only one per cent adjusted pay. Faced with a shortage, most organisations repeat the approach that is already failing, then blame the market.
The pay point deserves a pause. An organisation that will spend a fortune on recruiters and agency fees, and will not move on pay or on how it hires, has quietly decided the problem must be the market rather than its own choices. That is a comfortable conclusion and usually the wrong one.
I do not say this to scold. The pull toward the outside hire is understandable, since a finished expert promises no waiting and no risk of a failed development bet. The trouble is that the promise rarely holds, and the internal person you passed over tends to remember that you looked straight past them.
The diversity blind spot
One cause of self-made shortage hides in plain sight, a narrow idea of who fits. Jobs and Skills Australia found that occupations dominated by one gender are markedly more likely to be in shortage, while more balanced workforces tend to avoid it.
The point here concerns the size of the pond you fish in, more than quotas. When a role is coded, consciously or not, as work for one kind of person, you have shrunk your talent pool before the search even begins, and then called the result a shortage. Widening who you picture in the role, and who you will grow into it, is one of the cheapest and least-used remedies there is.
Field note
The expert they were hunting was already on the payroll
A mid-sized manufacturer told me they were desperate for a data analyst and had spent months and a large recruiter fee trying to hire one at the top of the market, with nothing to show for it. In the same conversation, almost in passing, a team coordinator mentioned that she spent her weekends building dashboards for fun and had taught herself the exact tools the role needed.
The cost to grow her into the role was a fraction of the salary they were chasing outside, and she was already trusted, already knew the business, and was hungry to do it. They had walked past their answer every day for months because she did not have the title or the degree the job ad demanded.
The lesson I carry from that engagement is to look inside before looking out, and to hire for appetite before credentials. The rare skill you are hunting is often sitting in your own team, waiting to be grown rather than found.
How to build skills as a regenerative manager
The regenerative response is to grow capability rather than only buy it. As a regenerative manager, you hire for the appetite to learn, you design work that teaches, and you grow people from within before you go shopping outside. This turns your team from a fixed stock of skills into a renewable source of them.
The mindset shift underneath is from consuming talent to cultivating it. A consumer of talent asks who already has the skill, and a cultivator asks who could grow it fastest, and over a few years those two questions build very different organisations.
Appetite before skill: hire and grow for learnability
My core principle here is appetite before skill. Since skills expire and appetite renews them, a person’s hunger and capacity to learn is worth more over time than the exact skill they hold on day one. Hire and promote for learnability, and you are buying an asset that appreciates.
In practice this means loosening the filters that screen out potential. Recruiting on appetites and demonstrated capability rather than only degrees widens the pool dramatically, and it surfaces the career-changers and self-taught people who often bring the freshest thinking. A strong appetite for a problem beats a stale qualification in it more often than most hiring managers admit.
Appetite is observable if you look for it. It shows up as the person who learns things nobody asked them to, who fixes the annoying problem on their own initiative, and who asks how something works rather than only whether it is their job. Those are the signals worth hiring on.
There is a limit worth naming, which keeps this honest. Appetite does not replace competence where lives or safety are on the line, so I am not proposing you grow a surgeon from enthusiasm. For the vast majority of roles, though, a motivated learner overtakes a reluctant expert within a year.
Standards still matter here. The trick is to measure the right thing, the trajectory a person is on rather than only the point they start from, and to bet on the steeper curve.
Design work that teaches
Learning velocity is built into how work is arranged, not bolted on through a course catalogue. A manager who wants a team that keeps learning designs the days so that learning happens inside the work itself.
- Stretch assignments: give people work just beyond their current reach, with support, so they grow by doing.
- Internal mobility: make it normal to move across roles and teams, so skills spread and boredom does not set in.
- Time to learn: protect real hours for learning, because a skill everyone must acquire on their own weekends will not be acquired.
- Teaching loops: have people teach what they learn, since teaching is the fastest way to embed a new skill and spread it.
- Reward the learners: recognise and promote the people who renew their skills, and expect it of everyone.
Feeding curiosity is part of the same job. A team that stays curious about the edges of its field renews its own skills without being told to, which is the cheapest reskilling program there is.
None of these lines needs a big budget. They need a manager to treat learning as part of the work rather than a distraction from it, and to protect the time and the stretch that make it happen. Learning velocity is a management choice long before it is a training spend.
Grow from within before you buy from outside
The regenerative default is to grow before you buy. Internal reskilling and mobility are cheaper, faster and less risky than external hiring, because you are developing people who already know the business and are already trusted.
This also treats the deeper problem, professional obsolescence, the slow slide into irrelevance that overtakes anyone who stops learning. A manager who keeps their people current is solving tomorrow’s shortage today, one grown capability at a time. Buying from outside still has its place, and it works best as the exception rather than the reflex.
There is a loyalty dividend too. People who are grown tend to stay, because a place that invests in them is hard to leave, which quietly solves the retention half of the shortage at the same time. Growing your own is a talent strategy and a keeping strategy in one.
Reconversion is not charity either. An internal move into a shortage area often beats an external hire, because the person already understands the customers, the systems and the unwritten rules that take an outsider a year to learn.
The wider market shows this works. Major employers have dropped degree requirements for many roles and now hire on demonstrated skills, widening their pool and improving retention, and Australia’s own apprenticeship and skills-based pathways point the same way.
Turn your team into a skills pipeline
Want to stop hunting for skills you could grow? Discover how I build learning velocity and appetite-based development in my keynote on regenerative leadership, made for teams tired of losing the talent race.
How to choose your approach to the skills shortage
Once a leadership team accepts that buying alone will not work, the question is how to balance building, buying and borrowing talent. Each has a place, and the mix depends on how urgent and how durable the need is. The comparison below is decision support, not a sales pitch.
Build, buy or borrow talent, for which situation
The three options solve different problems. Building grows durable capability slowly, buying fills an urgent or truly novel gap, and borrowing covers a short-term or specialist need without a permanent hire. Match the tool to the need.
The common mistake is to reach for buy and borrow first because they feel faster, then never get to build. Urgency is real, and the organisations that escape the shortage fill today’s gap by buying while committing to build, so the same gap does not reopen next year.
| Approach | Best when | What it changes | Watch-out |
|---|---|---|---|
| Build (reskill and grow) | The skill is core and will keep mattering | Your team’s lasting capability and loyalty | Slower, and it needs protected time to learn |
| Buy (external hire) | The gap is urgent or genuinely new to you | Immediate capacity in a specific role | Expensive, depreciating, and a flight risk if the culture is poor |
| Borrow (contract or partner) | The need is short-term or highly specialist | Access to a skill without a permanent cost | Knowledge walks out the door when the contract ends |
| Widen the net (appetite-based hiring) | Traditional filters keep returning no one | The size and diversity of your talent pool | Needs managers who can coach potential into performance |
The signals that should guide your investment
A few signals tell you where to lean. Read them honestly, because each points to a different mix.
- If you keep re-advertising the same role with no takers, widen the net and hire for appetite before you raise the budget again.
- If your best people are leaving for growth you could have offered, invest in internal mobility and development.
- If the skill will be obsolete in two years, borrow it rather than build a permanent team around it.
Whatever the mix, the through-line holds. Buy and borrow to survive the quarter, and build to win the decade, because the shortage is permanent and only a learning team is a permanent answer.
How I can help you master the skills shortage
I work with leadership teams that want to grow talent faster than the market can supply it. My role is to help managers hire for appetite, build learning velocity, and turn a shortage into a homegrown pipeline.
The aim, as ever, is to leave a team more capable than I found it, which is what regenerative management means when the topic is skills.
Keynotes and workshops on appetite, curiosity and regenerative leadership
My keynote on regenerative leadership reframes the skills shortage as a growing problem rather than a buying one, built around appetite before skill. In workshops and masterclasses, we build curiosity and learning velocity into your real teams, so reskilling becomes a habit rather than an event.
Reskilling that sticks is built into the work rather than delivered in a room, and that is where we start with your managers.
Manager programs and diagnostics
Because a single session rarely holds, I build manager development journeys that make appetite-based hiring and internal growth part of how the team works. When the skills shortage is tangled with the other pressures on your people, we set it back inside the full picture and work through a systemic response to the seven management crises, so you treat the chain rather than a single link.
Conclusion, the skills shortage is a management responsibility
The comfortable story is that there simply are not enough skilled people, and that the shortage is something the education system and the government must fix. There is truth in that, and it lets managers off a hook they should stay on. A large share of the shortage is made and unmade by how a team hires, grows and keeps its people.
The shortage will not be solved by one clever hire or one training budget. It is solved the boring way, by a manager who keeps growing people faster than their skills expire, month after month, until the pipeline is simply how the team works.
The better response is to grow what you cannot buy. Hire for appetite, design work that teaches, grow from within, and reward the people who keep renewing their skills. Do that, and the fifth link in the chain stops pulling the others down. Handled as a management responsibility rather than a market someone else must fix, the skills shortage becomes the moment your team turns into the pipeline everyone else is fighting over.
Frequently asked questions about the skills shortage
What is the skills shortage?
The skills shortage is the mismatch between the skills employers need and those available in the workforce. It is driven by a supply gap and by the fast expiry of existing skills. In Australia an occupation counts as being in shortage when employers fill fewer than two-thirds of their vacancies.
Which occupations are most in shortage in Australia?
Jobs and Skills Australia found around a third of assessed occupations in national shortage in 2024. The largest by employment size include aged and disabled carers, primary and secondary teachers, truck drivers and electricians, with technicians and trades workers the hardest-hit group overall.
Can you hire your way out of a skills shortage?
Rarely, on its own. Because around 39 per cent of core skills are set to change by 2030, bought expertise depreciates quickly, and endless external hiring cannot keep pace. The stronger move is to build learning velocity inside the team and grow people from within, using external hires as the exception.
What does hiring for appetite before skill mean?
It means selecting for a person’s hunger and capacity to learn ahead of the exact qualification they already hold. Since skills expire and appetite renews them, learnability is worth more over time. It also widens the talent pool to career-changers and self-taught people that a degree filter would miss.
