Future of Work – Skills and Industry Summit – Brisbane

Brisbane Convention Centre, 28th November

With Kerry O’Brien opening the event and as host, Annastacia Palaszczuk was introduced for the event’s opening speech before having to leave to attend to the bushfires concern in Baffle Creek region in QLD. Annastacia spoke about how QLD is staying proactive regarding the future of work to keep Queenslanders employed and the state a wealthy one. Queensland has apparently just overtaken NSW as the second-hottest destination for start-ups in Australia.

The Q&A panel was up next and included the following people:

Peter Hoj: ex-CSIRO board of directors, now the Vice-Chancellor and President of UQ has a main focus on science innovation. Peter is part of the movement that is emphasising flipped classrooms in higher education along with holistic business skills in relation to start-ups and research and development. As a result, early career researchers will graduate with the essential to collaborate with industry and the tools to get new ideas from the ether into the real world.
Leanne Kemp: QLDs new Chief Entrepreneur talked about start-ups and what she terms ‘scale-ups’ (start-ups with a scalability focus) and how we need more!
Dr Catherine Ball: talked about her “World of Drones” work and how start-ups should pre-empt what industry wants instead of waiting for demand – she replaced someone from Boeing that couldn’t make it, she was very knowledgeable and informed about current trends and future forecasts to do with technology disruption.
Ros McClennan: Queensland Council of Unions, spoke about the increase of casual and contract work roles in QLD which means less on-the-job upskilling/training due to the temporary nature of work. This is an unfortunate by-product of the gig economy as well as the need for companies to access specialists outside of their current employee’s skills.
Greg Hallam: spoke about the need for more data scientists and that there should be employee engagement for those skills taken into consideration within organisational development. The Digital Transformation Agency has already voiced their opinion on this as an essential aspect of employee engagement.

After lunch we were to attend our pre-designated workshops – our name tags had which workshop we were to attend already written on them. I attended Workshop #2 “Planning and Investing for our Future Workforce”. Solutions arrived at from the group considered that the workforce of the future will be digitally literate but will need entrepreneurial skills, soft skills etc and will need to know how to pivot, update and translate their current skills into what roles become available, because we just don’t know what they are now. Everyone in the future will need to know the basics of coding since so much work will be computer-based and QLD state government already has a schools-based program called “Coding Counts”.

A summary of each workshop was presented to all attendees once we joined together again in the main room. The main theme being technology disruption and suggestions for each. A summary ensued in which reference was made to physical camera film and other defunct products were once again dredged up as examples of a bygone area.

All in all, predicting what a future workforce needs, requires futurist projections based on current trends and consideration of Moore’s Law and AI’s own super Moore’s Law. But the real value in today’s session was (I believe), an awareness of what the government and others are doing and the inspiration to join them. It is certainly the age of technology more than ever before – exponential growth means exponential opportunities and it was great to hear that QLD government’s stance to support the experts and their start-ups is a high priority.

Jodie Hillman

Digital Learning Consultant