Karin Verspoor, the executive dean at RMIT University’s School of Computing Technologies, said Australia’s technology workforce requires a two-fold increase before 2030 to drive economic growth and maintain the country’s world-leading position in the industry.
Verspoor’s remarks come as the sector faces a massive skills shortage and ahead of the upcoming Federal Jobs Summit.
According to the RMIT expert, Australia will not be able to achieve its workforce goal utilizing its current approach of attracting school leavers to study information technology/computing.
“Technology is central to our daily lives today as like never before, and critical to our future and competitiveness as a nation in the global economy. The opportunities in technology are huge, with tech jobs being amongst the most well-paid, stable and flexible jobs in the Australian economy,” Verspoor explained.
The dean also highlighted the need to reskill more women to join the tech workforce and increase the diversity of people in the sector by training students from TAFEs and universities.
“We need to set up pathways that allow people to move into IT/Computing in mid-career, or with non-traditional backgrounds. We need programs that expose more people to the opportunities in technology and spark a passion in them to learn more,” she said.
As a woman in technology for over three decades, Verspoor has been an advocate for diversity in technology. She is a computer scientist with experience across US start-ups during the late 90s tech bubble, national laboratories including the US Los Alamos National Laboratory and NICTA (now Data61) Victoria Research Lab, as well as several universities.
She is a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health, the Victoria node lead of the Australian Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, a 2021 Brilliant Woman in Digital Health, a finalist in the 2022 Women in AI awards, AI in Innovation category, and winner of several TechDiversity awards.
