As we kick off a new year, demand for skilled and compliant workers remains sky-high in 2024, with mining job vacancies growing by almost 5% over the past 12 months and making up around 3% of total job vacancies. Companies seek people with the right mix of competencies to meet workforce demands and the changing regulations. As a result, reskilling and upskilling has become an important avenue for individuals looking to seize new job opportunities and advance their careers.
Workers in highly-regulated sectors build a collection of qualifications, training and credentials over the course of their careers. These attainments are all too often stored on PDFs on laptops, in email exchanges with ex-employers, and forgotten USB drives. This creates a major hurdle to present a comprehensive and verified view of skills, expertise and work history to potential employers. This is where the concept of a "Skills Passport" comes into play.
The Requirement: A National Skills Passport
The Australian Federal Government has recognised the need for a standardised system to verify relevant qualifications, and is posed to unveil an initiative that could change the way Australians are hired. The ‘National Skills Passport’ initiative aims to address the challenges associated with credential verification, creating a more efficient and transparent process for both individuals and organisations.
This plan resonates strongly with MyPass as we have long championed the need for a standardised system to manage worker compliance. MyPass leads as the industry standard Skills Passport, providing individuals with a secure and accessible platform to store, manage, verify and share their qualifications with ease.
Introducing the MyPass Solution
MyPass’ digital Skills Passport is designed to be a single source of truth, allowing individuals to securely store and manage their verified qualifications in one place. This bottom-up data ownership model is revolutionising credential management for both workers, and their employers. With MyPass, competency data is readily available at its owner’s fingertips, at all times.
MyPass is built to offer a win-win-win solution to all stakeholders
Workers and contractors
Apart from storing and sharing credentials, the MyPass Skills Passport allows individuals to show completion for assigned roles, apply for other roles, manage their schedule and availability and communicate with companies they’re connected with via chat.
Companies
Intelligent reporting and real-time data provides companies access to their workforce's compliance status, expiry dates and work history. This significantly reduces the administrative burden for companies and their sub-contractors operating in highly-regulated industries.
It is important to note that accessing your worker’s Skills Passport is just the start of the process, which often relies heavily on spreadsheets to track workforce onboarding and deployment. MyPass has invested heavily in customisable workflows to eliminate the need for spreadsheets and manual data entry. This significantly reduces the number of steps required to identify the right workers, prevent compliance gaps and then mobilise workers to site.
Industry
Real-time data is paramount in the workplace, particularly for managing safety and compliance. The standardisation of a digital Skills Passport across multiple industries provides the opportunity for organisations to unify and regulate competency requirements across participating companies. This creates safer, more productive workplaces as seen through the likes of the Verisafe initiative, which uses MyPass’ digital Skills Passport as a portable system of record. Major industry players and government bodies have already adopted MyPass as their preferred technology. As MyPass leads the new-wave of workforce compliance management solutions, we are well-placed to support the Australian Federal Government’s ‘National Skills Passport’ initiative, in pursuit of a unified standard for skills verification and management across diverse industries. Establishing a national workforce management standard that is not only more efficient, but more reliable than ever before, is within reach.
A look to the future
Employment in Mining is projected to grow by 15,900 (or 5.9%), and Health Care and Social Assistance is projected to grow by 301,000 (or 15.8%) over the five years to November 2026. As the demand for skilled professionals in critical sectors continues to rise, the MyPass Skills Passport marks a notable leap forward. It offers a streamlined, secure way to manage and verify credentials, transforming how industries operate and how workers engage with their careers.
Our solution, aligning with the Australian Federal Government's vision, signifies a transformative step towards a more connected, safe and agile workforce.