The Australian Government is supporting initiatives to strengthen and grow the clean energy vocational education and training (VET) workforce. These initiatives focus on ways to increase the available teacher and trainer workforce to meet critical workforce shortages to transition to the net zero economy.
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Building the clean energy VET workforce
The Clean Energy Generation report, released by Jobs and Skills Australia in October 2023, identified critical workforce shortages that will continue to grow while Australia transitions to a net zero economy. This report highlighted the scale of effort required if Australia is to meet its net zero ambitions and demonstrated that we have an urgent need to grow our clean energy workforce. The report found we will need close to 2 million workers in building and engineering trades by 2050, an increase of around 40%. The report also outlined a critical need for growth in Australia’s VET workforce.
To support building this workforce, the Australian Government announced in its 2024-25 budget, $30 million over 2 years to work with states and territories to turbocharge the teacher, trainer and assessor workforce for clean energy, manufacturing and construction.
This measure will include various state and territory led projects that look at different ways to build teacher and trainer capacity, including increasing the numbers in the workforce, as well as the knowledge and capacity of the workforce to deliver training in new technologies related to clean energy.