Aussie bank calls for skilled migrants to keep businesses working

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SYDNEY, Jan. 4 (Xinhua) -- About four in 10 Australian businesses are experiencing significant impacts from labor shortages, according to a new research by one of the nation's leading banks.

The Business Insight Report, released by the National Australia Bank (NAB) on Tuesday, was based on responses from about 1,600 businesses across a broad range of industries from mid-November to mid-December last year.

NAB chief executive officer Ross McEwan said bringing talent into Australia would be the key to alleviating the employment situation.

"Australian businesses are facing significant skilled and unskilled labor shortages. Almost every employer I talk to, from cafes, tourism, agriculture, and manufacturing, is saying 'we can't get workers'," McEwan said.

"To get the economy really firing we will need to bring people into Australia and make sure, as a nation, we're building a skilled workforce for the future," he said.

The report said that 38 percent of medium-sized businesses and 37 percent of larger firms viewed labor shortages as being a "very significant issue," compared with 31 percent of small businesses.

Lacking trade workers (35 percent) and professionals (32 percent) are the most common types of the labor shortage, according to about one in three Australian firms.

By state, Western Australia (WA) had the most pressing need for workers with 44 percent of businesses saying labor shortages had made a very significant impact over the past three months. At the other end of the scale, only 24 percent of businesses in the island state of Tasmania reported such a problem.

WA also leads in expectations of labor shortages over the next 12 months (43 percent), followed by New South Wales, Queensland, and the Australian Capital Territory (all 39 percent), South Australia and Northern Territory (36 percent) and Tasmania (20 percent).

McEwan said that data scientists, digital experts and technology skills were in high demand right across the economy in Australia.

"At NAB, we're doing a lot of work to retrain and invest in our workforce and we now have more than 2,000 colleagues who are certified cloud-computing practitioners," he added. Enditem

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