Minding the talent gap: tech skills in the startup ecosystem

Australia is facing a shortage of tech expertise, with a lack of data science and product management knowledge holding back growth in the local startup ecosystem.

With a recent report by StartupAUS showing a ‘talent gap’ when it comes to tech skills, we put the issue to a panel moderated by UTS Innovation & Entrepreneurship’s Professor Margaret Maile Petty:

Annie Parker, Global Head Startups, Microsoft

Bridget Loudon, CEO & Co-founder, Expert360

Alex Lynch, Public Policy Manager, Google

Murray Hurps, Director of Entrepreneurship, UTS

Margaret Maile Petty (MMP): Annie, where do you see Australia in the context of the report, and what do you think we need to focus on to accelerate our growth?

Annie Parker: The first thing is, I don’t see Australia as being different to most other countries. It’s interesting that a lot of the skills listed in the report were very much on the tech side, and that’s the same the world over, because what you’re doing by building a startup, is doing something that no one has done before. What you’re trying to do is find someone who is awesome at breaking things down into small, testable, chunks and figuring out what the right answer is.

Typically, that kind of mind-set lives in an engineer. However, if we actually look at who also has these skills to build, test, learn and problem solve; it’s lawyers. They’re amazing at breaking things down into small problems. We need to get better at understanding where these skill sets lie in more traditional jobs that we would usually discount.

MMP: Bridget, Expert360 has tripled in size year-on-year. How did you do that, and how much of it is an X Factor on top of the technical skills?

Bridget Loudon: Our mission is to make working for yourself work. Some new stats from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that, for the first time in Australia, there are more non-permanent workers than permanent workers, so that’s an incredible tipping-point for our economy. We build software to connect companies and individuals for project-based work, and our premise is based around the changing nature of the workforce.

MMP: In terms of recruiting staff, do you find this gap of talent, locally, is a challenge?

Bridget Loudon: It’s super hard. Our business is talent constrained, mainly in our ability to hire engineers and UX managers. Everyone is struggling with this problem, in the US as well, but in Australia there is a very small pool of people.

MMP: It’s interesting to consider this duality of immigration and education, because it really captures the spectrum of the problem: migration is the short term and education is the long term. In terms of government policy, Alex, what are you seeing through your role with these challenges?

Alex Lynch:  Since the skilled migration policies have changed, we’ve had difficulty in bringing in people that we need, with very specific skills. We’ve built a large engineering team in Australia, but what has happened as a result of these changes is that it’s difficult to continue to grow that team. The quality of computer science education across Australia is growing, but that isn’t our core problem. If we want to be a globally competitive technology ecosystem, we need to be able to access unique skills that don’t exist in Australia.

Annie Parker: In Israel, you see great access to talent: they teach computer science from primary school. Every Israeli company knows how to partner with the startup community. Here in Australia, the biggest issue is that most Australian businesses do not partner with early-stage tech companies. Corporate Australia should get their act together and start trialling these technologies that the startup community is bringing their way.

MMP: Murray, with your unique insights, as a veteran of the startup ecosystem looking at universities, what should we be doing to address these issues that sit across the corporate world and the ecosystem?

Murray Hurps: What makes people entrepreneurs is not the ability to be an entrepreneur, it’s finding the problem that they want to solve. These people are saving Australia. They’re creating the jobs and the investments. We need something to address the job losses that are coming up, something that will create prosperity, that will fuel the Australian economy into the future.

In terms of improving it, this is a good step: understanding where the opportunities are. I would love to have every parent read this report, and show it to their kids, and show them what their career path could look like.

MMP: Universities play an important role, but what can we do better? How can we collaborate more with industry?

Alex Lynch: The way that we do training, is going to change dramatically over the next few years. People need training that is flexible, and universities are at the crux of this. People require university-level training, so how universities change their training dynamic, how they can make it more flexible, is very important.

Transcript

[Music]

as an organization you know we're not

just competing on a national level we're

competing on a global on a global scale

on a global playing field and so it's

imperative for us that we have access to

absolutely a great global talent where

our major hire in the IT market here in

Australia just last year we hired more

than 200 people here in Australia and

finding the right people in the right

places is difficult companies at our

building right now with the skills that

we need them to have are all struggling

with the same problems the world over

lack of access to talent lack of access

to funding and more importantly lack of

access to customers there's are the

three things we can fix those three

things every startup globally will just

go thank you

[Music]

we really need the startup industry to

be working side-by-side with

universities and other other

organizations in the ecosystem to make

sure that talents really coming through

I think in the immediate term we can

import some of that talent from overseas

but in the medium and long term there's

no way we can do it by just importing

Talent we've got to grow that talent

here and universities are obviously a

critical pathway for doing that we

really have to work together as an

ecosystem and that means industry that

means education and that means our

students and our startups and when we

understand that it's not a single

problem that one partner owns it's

something that sits across all that we

do we're making the right steps so how

do we connect our students to

opportunities where they learn about

entrepreneurship where do we bring in

our industry partners so that they can

see what they can learn from our

students and how we can help them we

working with the tertiary sector and

with the tiller and his team and many

other universities across the country

we're working with a vocational sector

are we working with our clients are we

working with government to ensure that

as we think about the transition in our

workforce and as we look at the ways in

which we can contribute to helping to

develop pathways to build build new

skills and there are no typical career

paths anymore so the more we can

understand about how a person is going

from one job to the next

the more we can learn and help other

people make that same transition we're

going to need more through life training

we're going to need training people who

have families people who have homes who

have commitments are going to need

training that is flexible and the

universities are at the crux of this a

lot of this training people are gonna

require is a university level training

and so how the universities change their

training dynamic have a training that is

more flexible for people's life stages

that is available in bite-sized chunks

that people can digest remotely and and

to have a shared understanding of future

of accreditation

the employers can they buy into is going

to be very very

[Music]

You can download the full Startup Talent Gap Report here.

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