Looking forward: what skills will undergraduates need?

An important function of the university sector is to equip graduates with a mix of employability skills that meet the needs of a rapidly changing economy and labour market. Unfortunately, discussions related to employability skills and its connection to the skills requirement of the Australian economy have failed to materialise. It is this deficiency that this paper addresses. We combine two databases with the Monash Forecasting System. The US Department of Labor introduced the Occupational Information Network (O*NET), a comprehensive database linking worker (or employability skills) with occupations in both qualitative and quantitative terms. In this paper, the O*NET is applied to the Monash Forecasting system to conduct 'employability skills' forecasts. The results suggest that the structural details of the future state of the economy do indeed have important implications for the relative demands for various types of employability skills, and that general qualitative considerations provide only an incomplete basis for allocating training resources between those skills. Finally, the application of such forecasts can further assist the university sector in three ways: to develop graduate attributes; to allocate education resources; and to prepare courses closely related to the employability skill needs of university students.