Responding to workforce challenges in the community and social services industry

For many years – and especially since the pandemic – governments have paid considerable attention to the issue of skills and workforce shortages. Much of this attention has focussed on the community and social services workforce, which includes areas such as disability support, aged care, family violence, child protection, early childhood, family services, community-based mental health, homelessness, alcohol and other drug services and so on.

In a series of excellent major reports that started in May 2023 with the release of the Draft National Care and Support Economy Strategy 2023 and then moved on to the Australian Universities Accord Interim Report (July 2023), the 2023 Intergenerational Report (August 2023), and Working Future – the Australian Government’s White Paper on Jobs and Opportunities (September 2023), the Federal Government drew some very consistent and interconnected conclusions around the policy challenges we are facing, including:

• The community and social services industry is a massive driver of both our economy and our collective quality of life;

• We already face severe workforce shortages – and are on track to fall far short of the number of community and social services workers our community and economy needs in future;

• Current strategies to address workforce challenges are not working – despite best efforts – and we need new approaches;

• This is not a quick-fix situation: improvements will take time, investment, and effort from all levels of government, employers, vocational and higher education training providers, and the wider community;

• A big part of the solution needs to focus on doing a better job of supporting people to succeed in training and in their jobs – especially people from underrepresented groups or those who face barriers to education and employment.

Here in Victoria, the current State Government has been a major champion of this industry and the people it serves. Numerous reviews and Royal Commissions have resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars being committed to service expansion and reform.

All these reforms rely predominantly on one thing – a large, skilled, healthy workforce. But delivering this workforce is – as recognised in the reports listed above – a classic example of a wicked problem, with multiple complex factors contributing to the current state of affairs. Like any wicked problem, this one can’t be fixed quickly or with just one big intervention. We need to focus our efforts on a range of practical actions that we can actually carry out, guided by what evidence tells us is helpful and common-sense. In other words, acting now on small wins is far better than waiting for a big system overhaul that might never come (even though the big overhaul is also needed).

The longstanding workforce challenges outlined above have been identified as a major reason why reforms in the areas of mental health and early childhood have been slowed down (to say nothing of the substantial impact that shortages in the construction workforce have had on several major infrastructure projects).

This difficulty has remained, despite welcome investment in many of the levers the State Government has under its control, including, perhaps most significantly, investment in vocational education through its Free TAFE initiative and other related programs. So, what else can be done about this?

One of the interesting things we know about this industry is that despite the widely discussed negative aspects of employment in this area – think of the relatively low pay, the challenging nature of the work, low status, and an absence of clear career pathways – many people still want to work in jobs that help people. People want to make a difference. This is demonstrated by healthy rates of enrolment in various tertiary courses and the high number of people recruited each year by organisations that deliver these services.

Unfortunately, industry, government, and educators sometimes miss opportunities to capitalise on this widespread desire for a values-driven job. We can fail to adequately support people to complete their study (especially culturally diverse, older, and poorer students). Once employed, we do not develop and support people sufficiently in the early stages of their career, often adopting a sink-or-swim approach or failing to provide the level and quality of supervision new workers need to succeed. For those who do persist and start to build a career, there is often a lack of clear pathways and opportunities for further advancement. People can stagnate, burn out, and lose the passion they once had.

There are lots of interrelated reasons for this state of affairs: levels of funding and the short-term nature of funding; salary; excessive workloads caused by service demand and compounded by vacancies across teams; a lack of training for high-quality supervision; a failure to proactively support students who might be struggling and so on.

Since our establishment – with the support of the Victorian Government – the Workforce Innovation and Development Institute (WIDI) at RMIT University has been working with partners in government, education, and the community and social services industry to find innovative and scalable ways of strengthening the workforce. We adopt an approach described as social innovation which in simple terms means working together to find new solutions to longstanding problems – doing something different when what we are already doing isn’t working.

Our research has identified several practical steps that can be put in place with relatively modest investment or a realignment of current ways of working. Our project outcomes have pushed us towards seeking solutions that put workers first, and also challenge traditional cultures and practices around recruitment or job design that can act as barriers to finding the workers we need.

Here are some of the ideas that can work and contribute (in part) to improvements. None of these can be achieved by any government or stakeholder working alone – they all require collective effort and focus:

• Invest in more earn-and-learn programs. Start giving more people an opportunity to make a living while they gain a qualification rather than relying almost exclusively on a model that requires them to arrive at their first day at work already fully trained, having borne all the costs of that training themselves.

• Adapt our training models. We must continue to make the learning materials on offer more closely aligned with industry need and the modes of delivery much more accessible and flexible. We have made advances in this area but more needs to be done.

• Proactively support people while they train. This is especially important for culturally diverse students, older people, people from lower socio-economic backgrounds and those with previous negative experiences with education. We know what the risk factors are for dropping out – and we know many people won’t seek help themselves, or don’t know where to get it. We need better ways of reaching out to “at risk” students to ensure they succeed, such as structured mentoring programs like those recently supported by the Victorian Government.

• Improve induction and onboarding for new workers. Induction programs play a key role in supporting and retaining new workers and ensuring they feel prepared for their role. While individual organisations are often stretched to provide adequate induction and onboarding, in some sub-sectors induction resources are available at a system level to support organisations with the onboarding and training of new workers.

• Heavily invest in quality supervision. While many employers do an excellent job supervising and supporting staff, just as many don’t. We know this from applied research, surveys, exit interviews, a mountain of anecdotes, and the prevalence of people working in these (relatively lowly paid) fields who still pay for private, external supervision. If we don’t invest in high-quality support and supervision, we will never overcome the retention challenge.

• Strip away unnecessary tasks. Many staff report a sense of frustration driven by the need to complete unnecessary paperwork or other process tasks that seem to be of little value. Many of these tasks have origin stories from long ago – when a poor outcome led to a new obligation imposed on workers that is perhaps no longer relevant. An independent review of the things we ask workers to do, which asks if they are really needed, could help ease some workload stress.

• Develop innovative recruitment methods for target groups to boost workforce diversity. Recent research at WIDI has confirmed that the community and social services sector is not as culturally diverse as the workforce overall. The evidence indicates that greater workforce diversity not only increases workforce attraction and retention but also improves outcomes for clients and supports job satisfaction for workers.

None of these suggestions are new – and that’s partly the point. Sometimes innovation doesn’t require brand new ideas: it requires a willingness to adopt approaches that we intuitively know can help make a difference.

Here in Victoria, there are several instances of fantastic initiatives along these lines that government has supported. This includes support for earn-and-learn models, and targeted mentoring support for underrepresented students. The current Skills Solutions Partnerships program targeted at more flexible, industry-informed training models is another example.

Also recently, the Department of Families Fairness and Housing’s new Community and Social Services Graduate Program, with its emphasis on new models of recruitment and assessment and a focus on high-quality development, supervision, and cross-sector collaboration for new graduates, has reinforced the government’s willingness to try new things. This program has the potential to elevate the status of work in this vital industry, and to start treating it as an interconnected industry with significant career and development opportunities across multiple sub-sectors.

We are fortunate to have such interest and commitment to this area at both the state and federal government levels. The trick now is how to implement more of these types of things – working together collaboratively and strategically – in a time of increasing fiscal austerity.