While COVID-19 sends unemployment rates soaring, some employers - notably of nurses and truck drivers - are struggling to fill job vacancies.
The National Skills Commission Taskforce surveyed five industries experiencing relatively strong demand during the pandemic downturn. It contacted 2300 employers and found between them they had 988 vacant positions.
Eleven per cent of the employers were recruiting and nearly a third of them were having, or expecting to have, difficulty filling vacancies.
The survey, conducted between April 24 and May 8, listed truck drivers as being in the biggest demand, followed by registered nurses, retail sales assistants, aged and disabled carers, child carers, and metal fabricators and welders.
But nurses were deemed the most difficult occupation to recruit for, followed by truck drivers, and metal fabricators and welders.
The sectors surveyed were health care and social assistance; transport, postal and warehousing; manufacturing; retail trade; and wholesale trade.
Online job boards were the most popular method of recruitment, with nearly 70 per cent of employers using them.
A “nurse” job search on the Seek online employment site listed more than 5000 vacancies on Friday evening, while there were nearly 5000 truck driver positions listed.
The outlook is bleak in the wider job market, after Thursday’s labour force figures showed unemployment spiked to 6.2 percent in April, with Treasury forecasting it to balloon to 10 percent in the June quarter.
