Skills Initiative Timely and Well Targeted

Australia's structural skills shortage is one of the biggest constraints on our future growth and the action by the Federal Government to support 11,000 additional training places is timely and well targeted, the Australian Industry Group said. Small and medium sized companies in particular have found it hard during the downturn to maintain training budgets and especially apprenticeship numbers. Indeed, recent Ai Group research found that overall, the uptake of new apprentices is expected to be down by 10.6% over the current financial year and the number of apprentices in training will be down 5.9%. For SMEs the percentages are higher.