Industry outlook: health care and social assistance

Industry employment outlook reports provide charts and detailed analysis of the labour market characteristics of industries in Australia. This report for the health care and social assistance industry contains the following sections: Employment; Workforce characteristics; Future employment prospects; Skill shortages; Employers' recruitment experiences; Glossary. Key messages include: health care and social assistance is the largest employing industry in Australia, employing 12.3 per cent of the total workforce as at May 2014; the industry has experienced consistently strong growth over...  [+] Show more

Industry employment outlook reports provide charts and detailed analysis of the labour market characteristics of industries in Australia. This report for the health care and social assistance industry contains the following sections: Employment; Workforce characteristics; Future employment prospects; Skill shortages; Employers' recruitment experiences; Glossary. Key messages include: health care and social assistance is the largest employing industry in Australia, employing 12.3 per cent of the total workforce as at May 2014; the industry has experienced consistently strong growth over the past decade due, in part, to the ageing population and increasing demand for childcare, community and home based care services; the industry is generally older than the workforce as a whole, with 45.8 per cent of workers aged 45 years and over, compared with 39.1 per cent across all industries; a high proportion of health care and social assistance workers are highly skilled, with 42.9 per cent having attained a bachelor degree or higher qualification, compared with 28.4 per cent for employment as a whole; in 2013, the largest employing occupation in the industry was registered nurses with 221,000 workers; over the five years to November 2018, employment in the health care and social assistance industry is projected to increase by 16.3 per cent (compared with 7.2 per cent for employment as a whole), equating to around 229,400 new jobs, more than any other industry; shortages of health professionals and nurses were widespread and persistent over much of the decade to 2010-11, but in recent years, shortages have abated; and almost two thirds of recruiting employers in the health care and social assistance industry used formal methods to try to fill their most recent vacancies (such as the internet, newspapers and recruitment agencies), higher than the proportion across all industries (57 per cent).