A key to the growth of Australia’s economy is the health of the service industries, such as the retail, tourism and recreation industries. These service industries are underpinned by workforce skills, but clarifying which skills are common across all of these industries and which skills are specifically related to any one industry is a challenge being addressed by the DEST-funded Service Industries Skill Council.

“Some of the customer service skills needed by staff in a retail enterprise are the same as those needed at the reception desk in a doctor’s surgery, but the context is different and therefore the application of those skills is different,’ says Jeanette Allen, Chief Executive Officer of Service Skills. “It is partly about how skills are applied. The contextualisation of skills is vitally important to that enterprise,” says Allen.

Service Skills is responsible for influencing skills development opportunities for approximately 3 million of Australia’s 10 million workers, covering over 637,000 businesses. Industries involved include the wholesale, retail and personal services industries, the tourism and hospitality industry and the sport and recreation industry.

The labour-intensive nature of these industries means that the quality of skills is a key determinant of productivity. “In a people-intensive industry, meeting consumer and customer service demand is the paramount driver of skill needs,” says Allen.
Skill needs range from the technical skills for new entrants to the ongoing currency of skills required by the existing workforce. Skill development in service industries is made all the more difficult because the industries are often characterised by a young workforce mostly engaged in part-time or casual positions. These industries sometimes operate in non-traditional hours and in many cases are highly seasonal. 

According to Service Skills, challenges for service industries include:

• Providing resource products and services that support workers to rapidly acquire or upgrade broad-based skills and to continually refresh product-specific skills
• Ensuring that workers are multi-skilled and have the skills to deal with a wide range of cultural demands by customers
• Meeting the demand by enterprises for workers to acquire or update discrete skills that provide ‘just enough’ skill to meet enterprises’ immediate requirements
• Facilitating industry career paths and qualifications to help attract and retain workers to the industries
  Meeting the demand for employability skills such as problem solving, adaptability and communication.

I discuss these issues further in my ‘Inside VET’ column in Campus Review, 30 September 2005.