LMIP data portal

Occupation Resilience Framework

Insights into future job opportunities can support education policy, career decisions by job seekers and students, course offerings by education providers and broader policy and program design. These insights are vital to supporting Australia’s economic recovery from the impacts of COVID-19. While forecasting is difficult when underlying conditions are highly volatile, periods of volatility (such as now) are when there is often the greatest need for data and insights about the performance of occupations in the labour market.

In this context, the National Skills Commission has developed the occupational resilience framework. The framework focuses on the latest labour market data for occupations that reflect the recovery path the labour market is taking, and complements the pre-COVID employment growth projections available further down this page by providing insights into the relative impacts of COVID-19 on different occupations.

The occupational resilience framework ranks occupations at the four-digit level of ANZSCO in terms of their relative short to medium-term employment growth prospects. Each occupation is assigned a score out of five for each of three components.

 1) Pre-pandemic employment growth expectations

 2) COVID-19 employment shock

 3) COVID-19 labour demand recovery so far

The overall score is a summation across the three components. Occupations with an overall score of 11 or higher are considered to be resilient.

The list of resilient occupations will be updated following the release of detailed ABS Labour Force Survey data on occupational employment every quarter. The next update to the occupational resilience framework with November 2020 ABS Labour Force Survey quarterly data will occur in early February.

It should be noted that occupational resilience is an analysis framework that provides an indication of the relative employment strength of occupations. Jobs growth is not confined to occupations ranked as most resilient, and as the economy continues to recover, more and more occupations are likely to see solid and sustained increases in employment.

Further information about the occupational resilience framework, including analysis of the composition of the list and insights into its use for public policy purposes, can be found in the NSC report  ‘The Shape of Australia’s post COVID-19 workforce’

2019 Employment Projections - for the five years to May 2024

The 2019 employment projections do not take account of any impact caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and are therefore no longer reflective of current labour market conditions. As such, they should be used, and interpreted, with extreme caution.

Employment is projected to increase in 16 of the 19 broad industries over the five years to May 2024. Health Care and Social Assistance is projected to make the largest contribution to employment growth (increasing by 252,600), followed by Professional, Scientific and Technical Services (172,400), Education and Training (129,300) and Construction (113,700). Together, these four industries are projected to provide over three-fifths (or 62.1 per cent) of total employment growth over the five years to May 2024.

Each year, the National Skills Commission produces employment projections by industry, occupation, skill level and region for the following five-year period. These employment projections are designed to provide a guide to the future direction of the labour market, however, like all such exercises, they are subject to an inherent degree of uncertainty.

The 2019 employment projections are based on the forecasted and projected total employment growth rates published in the 2019-20 Budget, the Labour Force Survey (LFS) data (June 2019) for total employment, and the quarterly detailed LFS data (May 2019) for industry employment data.

If you are having trouble accessing the Regional Projections - interactive tool (excel file located above), please open our Common Issues file (Word) (57.7KB) For more information about file types, please go to our File Types page.

Employment Outlook to May 2024

The Employment Outlook to May 2024 provides an overview of the employment outlook across industries, occupations, states and territories, and regions.

Methodology for 2019 Employment Projections

The employment projections are based on detailed data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics Labour Force Survey. The projections have been derived from best practice time series models that summarise the information that is in a time series and convert it into a forecast. The projections are made by combining forecasts from autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and exponential smoothing with damped trend (ESWDT) models, with some adjustments made to take account of research undertaken by the National Skills Commission and known future industry developments. The projection for total employment growth is consistent with employment growth for the month of June 2019 and the Government’s forecasts and projections for total employment growth from 2019-20 onwards, as published in the 2019-20 Budget.

These projections are for total employment (ie, both full-time and part-time employment), according to the definition of ‘employed’ used by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) in the Labour Force Survey. For more information about the definition of employment, please go to the ABS website. Labour Force Survey data are collected by the ABS on a place of usual residence basis. The scope of the survey also excludes some groups of people (such as temporary overseas workers and permanent defence force personnel). For more information about the Labour Force Survey sample design, please go to the ABS website.