Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Materiel) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

asked the Minister representing the Minister for Defence, upon notice, on 9 November 2011:

In regard to Technical Skills Shortage:

(1) What work has been done by the department to assess technical skill levels within the Australian Defence organisation generally and as needed to achieve Force 2030, and can copies of any reports that have been prepared since 1 December 2007 be provided.

(2) (a) How are technical skill levels for the purposes of meeting current and future operational requirements and for the purposes of delivering Force 2030 measured within the Australian Defence organisation; and (b) what are the current technical skill levels in the: (i) department, (ii) Army, (iii) Navy, (iv) Air Force, and (v) Defence Materiel Organisation.

(3) How did the Navy reach the decision to award bonuses of up to $80 000 per annum to engineers, as reported in the media on 22 September 2011.

(4) What work has been done within the department to assess technical skill levels within the Defence industry and the Australian industry generally, to the extent that it affects the department and the delivery of Force 2030.

(5) Can a breakdown be provided by service and by group, of how many engineers are currently employed.

(6) (a)What are the churn rates within the department for engineers; (b) what are the separation rates for engineers; and (c) how do these churn and separation rates compare with applicable benchmarks.

(7) On what basis are engineers within the department engaged.

(8) Which current and future procurement projects are most dependent upon, and therefore vulnerable to, a shortage in technical skills, engineering skills in particular.

(9) Is a lack of technical skill currently jeopardising the department's capacity to fulfill its obligations under any major capital project contracts; if so, which projects and which contractual obligations.

(10) What 'Job Families', Graduate Programs and career structures are in place within the department to attract and retain technical staff, in particular engineers, and which specific engineering specialities are recognized and how.

Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Defence Materiel) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Minister for Defence has provided the following answer to the honourable senator's question:

(1) The Defence Strategic Workforce Plan 2010-20 articulates Defence's approach to workforce planning in support of the Defence White Paper 2009 and Defence's Strategic Reform Program. This plan draws heavily upon the intent of the broader strategic planning environment, and the implications for Defence's workforce and how Defence will deliver the workforce it requires to build Force 2030.

The Defence Strategic Workforce Plan 2010-20 provides a balanced discussion about the challenges faced by both the military and civilian workforces, and facilitates the provision of guidance for the development of respective Service and Group People Plans.

(2) (a) Current and future workforce needs are identified through a broad range of means. Defence uses the Defence Workforce Planning Cycle to aid in workforce planning – this cycle uses key strategic inputs such as the White Paper, Defence Planning Guidance, Joint Operations Concept, Defence Capability Statements, the Defence Capability Plan and the Strategic Reform Program to inform the broader Workforce Plan.

(2) (b) The Defence Materiel Organisation (DMO) current technical skill levels are underpinned by key capabilities that Technical Officers are expected to be skilled in at each level within the framework. The Materiel Engineering Council has determined that the following capabilities are the top ten priority skilling areas for Technical officers;

Defence is not immune from the challenges facing some sectors of the broader employment market in Australia. Defence is closely examining labour market trends, and internal workforce trends, to determine which components of the Defence workforce may come under pressure in the short and longer term.

Over the next 5 years the most significant employment growth in Australia will be in a number of occupations which are closely aligned to Defence critical skill areas. Future workforce data suggests that there may be impacts for Defence in some job categories or specialisations in the next 5 years due to a range of factors including the resources boom and an ageing workforce.

Defence notes that the demand in Australia for technical trades, engineers, and particular health and Information Communication and Technology (ICT) roles, is continuing to grow, and that Defence will need to continue to review its employment offer to retain such specialist skills.

(3) On 20 September 2011 the Chief of Navy announced a financial bonus offer for selected ANZAC and COLLINS class Marine Technician (MT) sailors. The scheme does not offer $80,000 per annum—it offers a maximum of $80,000 in return for two years service for the highest targeted qualification, scaled down to $40,000 for two years service (in two one year increments of $20,000) for the lowest targeted qualification.

The decision to offer a bonus was arrived at following consideration of the potential impact that increasing rates of separation in these groups might have on Navy's ability to continue to deliver the appropriate level of ANZAC and COLLINS capability, and in the longer term, other Navy capabilities.

This bonus is designed to encourage key MT personnel within the ANZAC and COLLINS classes to remain in the Navy to ensure we have suitably trained people providing the appropriate level of supervision and support to keep our ANZAC frigates and COLLINS submarines at sea and, importantly, to enable us to more quickly qualify the many marine technician and other categories of sailor who are coming through the training system.

(4) In 2009, Defence surveyed DMO's 50 largest Australian-based suppliers, seeking information on their defence industry skill levels. Between them, the surveyed firms account for around 95 per cent of DMO's domestic expenditure with prime contractors. The survey results form a skills 'baseline' to which defence industry can be compared in future, to identify structural shifts in the defence industry workforce, and to make comparisons against skilling requirements in non-defence areas of the economy.

In this respect, the results from the survey are currently assisting Skills Australia structure a more comprehensive and forward looking review of whether sufficient skills exist in domestic defence industry to support Defence and the delivery of Force 2030 and how the capacity and capability of the domestic defence industry can be enhanced. For example, the survey is being used by Skills Australia to devise a set of skills categories relevant to defence industry and the survey's results are likely to be used by Skills Australia to help determine trends in the availability of particular skills over time.

The Priority Industry Capability (PIC) health checks completed to date—for Combat Clothing, Infantry Weapons, Dry Docking and Common User Facilities, and Acoustics—have had a strong focus on the availability within domestic industry of labour skills necessary to support the capital equipment and systems considered to be of the greatest strategic significance to the Australian Defence Force (ADF). The process of checking the health of these PICs has involved direct and detailed discussions with relevant defence contractors on the make-up of their workforces. These discussions included skills profiles, age profiles, geographic concentrations and mobility. Importantly, the process looked explicitly at future demand for skills and seeks to match this to supply.

DMO has conducted an Engineering and Technical training needs analysis of the entire Engineering and Technical workforce within DMO.

The DMO Institute Expansion Program for the Engineering and Technical Job Family is progressing in accordance with the Industry Skilling Program Enhancement (ISPE) initiative.

DMO corporately sponsored training to the Australian Defence Force Academy, University of NSW (UNSW) for specialist Engineers (i.e. Systems Engineers).

DMO is providing sponsorship for the 2012 Systems Engineering Conference to support DMO Engineers Continuous Professional Development.

(5)

(1) This data, correct as at 31 October 2011 shows officers between O02 (Lieutenant and equivalent) and O05 (Lieutenant Colonel and equivalent) and includes 8 Air Force officers at the O01 level (Pilot Officer).

(2) The above tables show employees who belong to the 'Engineering and Technical' job family. Employees in the DSTO are typically categorised as belonging to the Science and Technology job family and are not included in the above results.

(6) (a) and (6) (b) Current Human Resource reporting tools within the department are not currently designed to report on churn rates. Separation rate data provides some indication of the movement of engineers and is set out in the following tables (correct as at 31 October 2011).

(1) This data, correct as at 31 October 2011 shows officers between O02 (Lieutenant and equivalent) and O05 (Lieutenant Colonel and equivalent) and includes 8 Air Force officers at the O01 level (Pilot Officer).

(1) Note – DMO workforce management practice is to include ongoing and non-ongoing staff in these statistics. Defence workforce data only contains ongoing/permanent staff.

(6) (c) ADF engineering and technical separation rates are only benchmarked against historical internal trends. Attempts in the past to benchmark against other Defence Forces (such as Canada) have proven inconclusive owing to different remuneration structures.

(7) Engineers are employed in those roles where the needs for engineering skills or experience have been identified.

(8) The work of the Defence Materiel Organisation is technical and complex. All Defence projects are dependent on technical and engineering skills to some degree. Engineering and technical skills improve the DMO's ability to assure value for money—and to reduce capability risks, schedule risks, cost risks, reliability risks and safety risks.

Off the shelf procurements have a lesser requirement for engineering and technical skills. Where the capability requirement allows, the DMO uses off the shelf options as a means of reducing risk. This also allows technical skills to be directed to more complex procurement or sustainment business areas.

At the other end of the spectrum, systems integration is particularly challenging. Supporting modern operations requires an organisational capability to select, procure, integrate and make interoperable a very complicated system of systems. This requires scarce high-level engineering and technical skills to adequately manage the risks.

The effectiveness of risk mitigation for most DMO projects is influenced by the availability of appropriate technical skills. Nearly every electronic systems project, guided weapons project and platform modification project is dependent on engineering and technical skills—which is a substantial portion of the Defence Capability Plan.

Like many organisations reliant on technical skills, the DMO is experiencing an ongoing challenge with attracting, developing and retaining high quality engineers and other high quality technical professionals. This is best characterised as a long term problem that the DMO is working consistently to address—it is not, overall, a crisis. Noted skills shortfalls being experienced today by the DMO include radio frequency engineers, software engineers, satellite communications engineers, tactical data link engineers, systems engineers, guided weapons engineers and technical experts in simulation.

The DMO has a wide range of programs and activities in place or planned to ameliorate attraction, retention and development challenges.

Further, the importance of engineering and technical skills in sustaining military capability should not be forgotten. As can be seen from Mr Rizzo's Plan to Reform Support Ship Repair and Management Practicesand our experience with sustaining the Collins class—maintaining complex capabilities after delivery relies heavily on strong engineering and technical skills.

The study by Skills Australia to map the current skill sets in Australian defence industry is underway, and will examine the skills that will be required over the next 10 years and beyond, and how we might bridge the gaps. Until the study's results are available in mid 2012, it is difficult to determine whether particular procurement projects are vulnerable to skills shortages.

In addition, as checks of the health of the remaining eight Priority Industry Capabilities are progressed, a clearer idea of skills issues relating to industry capabilities of relatively high strategic value should be available. These checks will cover the broad capability areas of high frequency and phased array radars, electronic warfare, mission and safety critical software, systems integration, anti-tampering, signature management, munitions, and the Collins combat system.

(9) Defence, in particular the DMO, has a substantial workforce of engineers and staff with other technical skills. In most cases the available talent can be managed to adequately treat most of the foreseeable risks. On the one hand, the DMO's technical workforce could be stronger which would reduce the risk and the pressure on DMO management. Realistically though the DMO's technical workforce can never entirely achieve the ideal quality nor be of unlimited quantity.

Risks to the DMO's capacity to fulfil its obligations under any major capital project contracts are addressed wherever possible and if particular risk mitigation (such as technical skills) cannot be relied on, other risk controls will be explored and applied. So it is not simply that a deficit in skills will automatically lead to project failure.

The contemporary skills challenge is characterised by regional variations. Defence's experience is that technical skill supply and demand vary significantly by location and are strongly influenced by the local economy and industry. Perhaps the most acute challenges for the DMO are presently in Western Australia, where competing for the experts needed to sustain maritime platforms and conduct munitions maintenance is proving difficult during a resources boom.

(10) All Australian Public Service (APS) jobs in Defence are given a job code according to the Defence APS Standard Classification of Occupations and assigned to a Job Family. A Job Family identifies at the broadest level the categories of related occupations across the APS workforce in Defence.

Defence has fifteen APS Job Families. There is an Engineering and Technical Job Family. Each Job Family has a senior level sponsor who has responsibility for developing career path guidance within their Job Family, and specifying the skills, learning and development (including experience) requirements for those career paths. The existence of career pathways in a Job Family does not limit the ability of employees to move to positions in other Job Families is they are suitable.

Defence provides a variety of attraction and professionalisation strategies to support its job families. These include, but are not limited to, early engagement strategies such as the Defence Technical Scholarship program, entry level programs such as the Defence Graduate Development Program, Materiel Graduate Scheme, the Civilian Engineering Development Program, ADFA Engineering Undergraduate Scheme, Materiel Work Experience Program and Materiel TAFE Employees Scheme targeted at attracting and retaining technical staff, including engineers. Memoranda of Agreement have also been established with Engineers Australia and the Australian Maritime College.

Additionally, Defence Force Recruiting has strategies in place to improve recruitment to technical and engineering categories in the Australian Defence Force, including specialist recruiting teams in the engineering and technical space.

Defence recognises a number of engineering academic disciplines through its entry programs including: civil, mechanical, electrical, communication, aerospace communication, chemical, electrical, instrumentation and control, software, systems, aeronautical computer systems, naval architecture, space, telecommunications, mechatronic, information, materials.

Defence delivers a range of professionalisation and training programs for Engineers. These include Certification of professional engineers and technical officers through Engineers Australia. Additional professionalisation and training programs are being investigated including submarine design and development courses for engineering and technical officers.