“No shortage” means employers can fill the job at the pay they already offer

The definition, and the three conditions attached to it

Jobs and Skills Australia publishes its method, which is more than many agencies do. The definition is the place to start, because everything else follows from it. An occupation is in shortage when employers are unable to fill vacancies, face considerable difficulty filling them, or cannot meet significant specialised skill needs within the occupation, and then three conditions are attached:

• At current levels of remuneration
• At current conditions of employment
• In reasonably accessible locations.

Read the first two against the aged care debate and the rating changes meaning. A finding of no shortage is not a finding that the workforce is sufficient, that turnover is acceptable, or that the job is attractive. It is a finding that employers are filling vacancies on the terms they are currently offering. An occupation could be poorly paid, hard, and still rated no shortage, precisely because enough people take it anyway.

The measure that implements this is the fill rate, the proportion of vacancies that employers can fill. Lower fill rates indicate shortage; higher fill rates indicate fewer recruitment challenges.

How a rating is actually made

There are three stages, and knowing which one produced a given number matters.

One detail in stage 3 is worth noting because it is counterintuitive. Feedback is sought on the stage 1 preliminary ratings rather than the stage 2 verified ones, and the methodology says why: to ensure timely production of the OSL and to provide stakeholders with sufficient time to review and share feedback. Reviewers are commenting on the model's output, not on the verified figure.

Feedback is not simply adopted. It is scored against a matrix, rejected if it falls below a minimum benchmark, and where it clears the benchmark it is compared against the stage 2 work and accepted only if it provides stronger evidence than what were used in the stage 2 process. Where no feedback arrives, the stage 2 rating stands. That is a more disciplined process than simply asking the states and recording their answers.

But the state ratings are not modelled

This is the part that most changes how our earlier story should be read, and it is stated plainly:

Modelling, data analysis, research and assessments are undertaken to produce national level ratings and not state level ratings.

The published state ratings are based on the accepted feedback from the 3 mentioned groups of stakeholders, with the states and the Jobs and Skills Councils asked whether the national rating applies in their jurisdiction. JSA itself recommends that state level analysis be based on the products and outputs produced by the states.

So when we reported that Residential Aged Care Worker is rated in shortage only in Western Australia and the Northern Territory, those two ratings did not come out of a model. They came from stakeholders in those jurisdictions persuading JSA that the national rating did not apply to them, and that feedback surviving a scoring process. That is a reasonable way to capture local knowledge a national model cannot see. It is not the same kind of number as the national rating, and it should not be quoted as though it were.

The rule that makes an empty labour market look like a satisfied one

Two further rules govern state ratings. The second aligns a national rating with accepted state ratings where those states collectively hold more than two thirds of national employment in the occupation. The first is the one to know about:

An occupation is rated as NS in a state with zero employment recorded.

The stated reason is sound: A shortage cannot exist where there is no active labour market for that occupation. You cannot be short of workers in a job nobody there does. The footnote adds that The occupation employment level is based on the 2021 ABS Census.

The consequence is that the two letters "NS" carry at least three different meanings in the published list: employers are filling vacancies at current pay and conditions; or nobody in that state was recorded doing the job in the 2021 Census; or no stakeholder feedback arrived and the national rating simply carried through. The list does not distinguish them, and a reader treating NS as a single fact will misread some of the grid.

The caveats JSA states about its own list

The methodology sets out limits that deserve to travel with any use of the ratings. The list is a point-in-time assessment of occupations in the labour market and is not forward looking. It is an employer-focused view of shortages and is driven by data on employers’ recruitment activity. Data inputs lag, some by a month and some delayed by 3 to 6 months or even up to a year. And the classification does not reflect the severity of shortages, so an occupation short everywhere and one just over the line read identically.

Our view

Publishing the method is to JSA's credit and this piece exists because they did. Nothing here suggests the list is badly made; the three-stage process, the scoring of feedback and the refusal to accept it without stronger evidence are all more rigorous than the output implies.

The problem is what happens downstream. This list is embedded in skilled migration and apprenticeship incentive policy, so a rating is not merely a description, and the ratings travel as two-letter labels while the definition that gives them meaning stays in a separate PDF. An occupation rated no shortage because employers can fill it at current pay is described with the same two letters as one rated no shortage because nobody in the state does it.

For aged care specifically, the conditional on remuneration is not a technicality, it is the whole argument. The sector's case for its workforce has been about pay and conditions for a decade, and a measure defined as filling vacancies at current pay and conditions is, by construction, incapable of registering that case. That does not make the residential no-shortage rating wrong. It makes it a narrower statement than the words suggest, and worth quoting with its conditions attached.

What we would want next: the Occupation Shortage Analysis and the Survey of Employers that sit behind the fill rates, and whether any aged care rating changed at stage 3, which is the difference between a modelled finding and an accepted argument.