There is plenty to celebrate at the Analytics Institute of Australia this week.
For the first time, the Institute has a graduating cohort, and our students are putting the finishing touches on their final semester Analytics Projects. Naturally, there is plenty of excitement about graduation. But there has also been a few raised eyebrows as some of those projects have produced findings that do not necessarily line up with what government policy appears to be telling us.
One project in particular raises an interesting question about Australia’s approach to international graduates.
Current graduate migration settings favour graduates who settle and find employment outside Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. The logic is straightforward enough: if Australia needs skilled workers in regional areas, policy should encourage graduates to move to where the jobs are.
The problem comes when the data suggests the jobs might actually be somewhere else.
There are certainly parts of regional Australia where opportunities for international students and graduates are growing. The Northern Territory, for example, appears to be going from strength to strength in attracting and retaining international talent.
But are all of the destinations being promoted by government policy actually experiencing the graduate labour shortages that the policy assumes?
That is where the students’ analysis gets interesting.
As part of their final semester project, a team led by Avi Perera analysed analytics skills and job vacancies currently being advertised across Australia.
The project’s primary purpose was to identify the skills that students, graduates and early-career professionals should develop to improve their employability and career prospects.
To do that, the students undertook a comprehensive analysis of Australian job advertisements.
And then they found something rather inconvenient.
According to the analysis, 61 per cent of analytics vacancies are located in Victoria and New South Wales.
Those happen to be two of the states containing Australia’s biggest cities, including Melbourne and Sydney, where international graduates face less favourable migration prospects under the current settings.
There are vacancies in regional Australia, of course. But in the analytics market at least, the numbers suggest they represent a relatively small slice of the overall employment opportunity.
Meanwhile, some of the destinations being promoted as alternatives, including regional Tasmania and South Australia, appear to have comparatively few vacancies in analytics.
That creates an obvious tension.
If international graduates are being encouraged, or effectively incentivised, to move away from Australia’s biggest employment centres, shouldn’t there be sufficient employment opportunities waiting for them when they arrive?
Otherwise, we risk creating a policy that successfully moves graduates away from the places where the jobs are, rather than towards the places where they are needed.
To be clear, this particular study looked specifically at analytics jobs and skills. It is not evidence that every occupation tells exactly the same story.
But that is also what makes the students’ methodology potentially valuable. The same approach could be applied across different occupations and skill sets to test whether Australia’s graduate migration settings are actually aligned with labour-market demand.
Perhaps the results would be different.
But somehow, I suspect they might not be as different as we would like to believe.
Which brings us to the bigger question.
When governments design policies intended to influence where international students study, where graduates work and where skilled migrants settle, how closely are they examining the employment data underpinning those policies?
My students don’t have much choice.
If they don’t examine and scrutinise the data, they don’t pass.
Perhaps the Government should adopt the same approach.
Because when it comes to international graduates, telling people where the jobs are is one thing.
The data should be able to prove it.
