• Posted on 30 Jul 2018
  • 7-minute read
L-R: Murray Hurps, Bridget Loudon, Alex Lynch and Annie Parker. Photo by Alessia Francischiello.
L-R: Murray Hurps, Bridget Loudon, Alex Lynch and Annie Parker. Photo by Alessia Francischiello.

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.

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Descriptive transcript

[Music]

As an organisation, we're not just competing on a national level, we're competing on a global scale, on a global playing field, and so it's imperative for us that we have access to absolutely A-grade global talent.

We're a major hirer 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 that are 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. Those are the three things.

If we can fix those three things, every start-up globally will just go, thank you.

We really need the start-up industry to be working side by side with universities and other organisations in the ecosystem to make sure that talent's 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 start-ups.

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're working with the tertiary sector, with Attila and his team, and many other universities across the country. We're working with the vocational sector, we're working with our clients, we're 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 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. 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 that people are going to require is university-level training, and so how the universities change their training dynamic, have training that is more flexible for people's life stages, that is available in bite-sized chunks that people can digest remotely, and to have a shared understanding of the future of accreditation that employers can then buy into, is going to be very, very important.

So we're doing quite a lot of work with UTS and other organisations within the start-up ecosystem to understand what those talent gaps actually are, and this report is a really good example of that. And also to try and encourage the development of entrepreneurship programs and programs focused on getting students into start-ups and actually getting them that hands-on experience with the kinds of products and the kinds of business environments that start-ups are building.

Even up through the university level, we try to work with universities, particularly those outside the Group of Eight, where they're trying to build their profile and trying to build their new technology programs to help them become competitive in their computer science education.

And so that's actually resulted in some interesting changes, in that we're recruiting more now outside of our traditional cohort of universities because the quality of computer science education across Australia is growing.

At UTS, we work on a couple of things that are really important in our industry, which is education, research, and working with industry. So what we do is we develop a whole suite now of fantastic curriculum that's really looking at how you take disciplinary strength and apply it to real-world problems through different lenses of innovation, creativity, and emerging tech.

What we're doing is to see how can we translate this knowledge that we have in the university to value and impact in the world.

You can download the full Startup Talent Gap Report here.

Visit entrepreneurship.uts.edu.au and sign up to our Innovation and Entrepreneurship newsletter to discover more entrepreneurial opportunities at UTS. 

Byline: Liam Kennedy, UTS Innovation and Entrepreneurship

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