HALF a million extra workers will be needed to complete a range of resource and energy projects, according to labour hire company Skilled Group chief executive Mick McMahon.
The government announced in the budget that it would allocate 16,000 places in the skilled migration program for regional areas as well as new migration agreements for large resource projects, reported The Australian.
Workers who arrived on a 457 visa and were employed in a regional area for two years would have their residency applications speeded up if their employer could show they were needed for a further two years, the government announced.
Appearing on ABC TV's Inside Business yesterday, Mr McMahon was asked by Alan Kohler if 16,000 skilled migrants were enough to fill the demand for the expected workload required to complete a variety of projects.
"Again, in the long run the right answer is to train more Australians to do these jobs," Mr McMahon said.
"There's no doubt, though, that this will help, particularly if they're targeted at the high end, very scarce skills, which may be a bottleneck to a project, to a time line.
"So it may be a project engineer, it may be a geologist, it may be those sorts of skills we're struggling to find, and particularly targeted at the remote locations, I think is also helpful.
"So whatever helps our clients helps us. In the end 16,000 jobs, when you need maybe 500,000 jobs over the next few years, it's not the main game."
Mr McMahon said it was relatively easy to find people to perform low-skilled work but there were specific jobs such as electricians, diesel fitters, mechanics and high-end welders in remote regions that were harder to fill.
Despite the fall in job numbers last month, Skilled had not seen much of a decline in demand for labour.
"Probably in the last month or so, we've seen a little stronger figures down the east coast of Australia, which have been a little softer than we might have liked with the effect of the rain and the wet weather on parts of our business and, I think, the high dollar on some of our manufacturing clients," Mr McMahon said.
"But in general we'd say the demand for our services is continuing."
Source:http://www.heraldsun.com.au/business/resource-and-energy-sectors-need-500000-hands/story-fn7j19iv-1226056494338
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