Skill shortage remains a joke

I read that some companies are saying that there was plenty of employment opportunities on the Coast and that they were having trouble attracting staff.

Woe to them, but why can't they attract decent staff?

On a closer read, the skills they were wanting were highly specialised computer code development capabilities.

Hello! Those types of skills are very difficult to find in all of Australia, and particularly on the Central Coast.

The irony is we moved up the Coast and found ourselves "overqualified" for pretty much all the work going up here.

After six months of no success and very willing to take on much lower level work than previous.y, members of my family are still looking and I'm on the usual two hour daily commute, each way, to work in Sydney, just like most of the other highly skilled workers that live up here.

There is a lack of work opportunities on the Coast.

If people really want to seriously tackle unemployment for both the young and mature on the Central Coast, then there has to be a lot more organisations like (the former) Workcover who need move their support and back office operations from the Sydney CBD to places like Gosford.

For some reason, Parramatta seems to have been quite successful in attracting major business and investment, like Roads and Maritime Services who exited the CBD and moved their backend operations to Parramatta, joining the likes of Sydney Water, in recent years.

So, what is Parramatta doing right that the Central Coast isn't?

Until more organisations do this sort of move up the Coast, serious employment remains a long commute into the city and the notion of there being lots of work opportunities and a shortage of skilled people on the Coast is a merely a bad joke.

Email, 15 Oct 2019

Colleen Poulter, Ettalong