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This paper examines the demographic and labour market conditions affecting the public sector workforce in the coming decades. These conditions mean that the sector will need to engage in innovative workforce planning in order to maintain efficiency and effectiveness in service delivery. The potential costs of a sustained policy of public sector workforce reductions are highlighted. The authors discuss the global economic outlook and that of Australia and South Australia, the size of the South Australian public sector, population ageing and implications on service delivery, and workforce planning for the 21st century.

The authors emphasise the need to ensure that short-term pressures to cut expenditure do not undermine the capacity and capability of the public sector to innovate. Central to this is the retention of critical knowledge and skills and the orderly transfer of these from older workers to younger workers as part of a public sector age management strategy.

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The South Australian (SA) budget announced large reductions in public service sector employment in recent State Budgets. This study, undertaken by the Australian Workplace Innovation and Social Research Centre (WISeR) at the University of Adelaide, aims to examine the impact of this proposed policy in terms of the value of skills and knowledge that will be lost in the process. The loss of workers, especially those with more experience and skill, will result in the loss of corporate knowledge and hinder the transfer of skills within organisations. This is particularly relevant to the services sector such as the public service, where the intrinsic quality of work is reflected in the services provided. The aim of this study is to identify the different aspects of valuing the skills and knowledge that are lost to the organisation (the SA government, in this instance) as a result of staff reductions. Given the paucity of available data, this study will focus on this 'sunk' cost and attempt to identify baseline costs of losing skilled staff. However, even this approach is constrained by data limitations. Hence the estimates provided here should be interpreted only as a first step in broadening our understanding of this complicated conceptual and analytical task.

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Part time work (defined by the [Australian Bureau of Statistics] ABS as involving employment of less than 35 hours per week) is now a key feature of employment in Australia having grown significantly over the past two decades so that Australia has a higher proportion of part time workers than most other OECD countries. Depending on how it is managed, part time work can be a valuable work-life-balance tool for employees while being valuable to employers in terms of productivity. When part time employment brings benefits for both parties it is considered to be ‘quality part time work’. The ‘Quality part-time work’ project was initiated by the SafeWork SA WorkLife Balance Strategy in response to the important role that part time work plays in South Australia and to focus attention on the dimensions and importance of quality part time work in the context of work-life balance objectives. This discussion paper is part of that project, and draws together information from work-related research and from key data sets (such as the ABS) in order to isolate the factors that determine quality part time work.

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The first wave of the Workplace Futures Survey (WFS) - Playford and Salisbury was implemented in November 2013, just prior to the announcement of the closure of the [General Motors] GM Holden production plant in Elizabeth by 2017. This survey included responses from 451 employers across the Cities of Playford and Salisbury. The second wave of the survey was administered six months later in May 2014, with a total of 455 employers, of which 33 were continuing participants from the previous round. The timing of the two surveys provides a clear comparison of ‘before’ and ‘after’ the auto closure announcement revealing the initial impacts of this severe economic shock on employer sentiment. The surveys therefore have come at a critical period in the regional economy of northern Adelaide. Wave 2 of the survey is a shorter version than Wave 1, and was primarily intended to gather employer perceptions contributing to the Workplace Futures Index (WFI). In addition, Wave 2 includes new thematic questions relating to the impact of the auto industry closure. This report presents the findings from the second wave of the WFS and provides a comparison with the first wave of the survey.

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Given the considerable movement of labour and employment within and around regions, the City of Playford and Adelaide-North labour markets and policies are inextricably linked to those of the surrounding areas. Understanding regional labour market dynamics, including the incidence and outcomes of shocks is critical in policy formulation. This paper explores ageing of the regional population and ageing of the workforce in Adelaide–North in order to plan for the replacement of an ageing workforce and to understand the potential demand for goods and services for an ageing population.

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Adelaide's northern suburbs face significant challenges over the next five to 10 years as they contend with high local unemployment and impending closures in regional manufacturing. At the 2011 Census, establishments located in the Cities of Playford and Salisbury employed 8.6 per cent of South Australian workers and 16 per cent of the state's manufacturing workers. It is, therefore, critical to understand the current and future employment and skill requirements of employers in the area to better support policy development and planning. The Workplace Futures Survey (WFS): Playford and Salisbury is seeking to address some of these questions. This first WFS survey administered in November 2013 provides a baseline, having been conducted prior to the announcement of the 2017 closure of [General Motors] GM Holden. Respondents from 451 establishments (with over 12,500 employees participated in the survey) - a response rate of 12.5 per cent.

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This study explores the school-to-work transitions of youth aged 16 to 25 based on the 2006 cohort of the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY Y06). Five pathways were identified using sequence analysis combined with cluster analysis. While the majority of the young people in the study sample followed a mostly simple higher-education-to-work pathway or early entry to full-time work, the remaining quarter of the sample experienced varied and complex transitions including frequent switching between higher education and vocational education and training (VET) activities, episodes of part-time work and repeatedly disengaging from the labour market. In pathway 2, VET gave an early route to full-time work that resulted in full-time work for 97.4 per cent at age 25.

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