Australias version of the great resignation revealed as staff swap jobs

The post-lockdown recovery is driving a resurgence in job hopping, in Australia’s version of the “Great Resignation”, after employees stayed put and focused on retaining work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Figures from professional networking site LinkedIn provided to The Sun-Herald show a 26 per cent jump in Australian workers moving from one company to another in October, compared with the same time in 2019, before the pandemic.

LinkedIn Australia country manager Matt Tindale said it was a reflection of pent-up demand after few people changed jobs in 2020.

“The vast majority of people were hunkering down in their roles through the pandemic period,” Mr Tindale said.

In the United States, in a phenomenon dubbed the “Great Resignation”, nearly 35 million workers quit their jobs this year, prompting dozens of think-pieces about people seeking better work-life balance because the pandemic shifted their personal priorities. The simple explanation is supply and demand â€" in August, the US had 10.4 million job openings and 7.4 million unemployed people, providing a rare opportunity for workers to demand better pay and conditions.

In Australia, workers still outnumber jobs. The October employment figures released last week show 707,300 unemployed people and associated under-employment, while job vacancies stood at 333,700 in August, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).

Yet employees with in-demand skills have more bargaining power than they have had in decades. Job vacancies peaked at 369,900 in May before the Sydney and Melbourne lockdowns, a record since the ABS started collecting the figures in 1979. The previous record before the lockdown was 232,600 in February 2019.

Hays recruitment firm managing director Nick Deligiannis said the occupations experiencing salary increases included information technology, legal, HR, life sciences, mining, and accountancy and finance.

However, the wage increases were in the 2-3 per cent range, he said, and that was “often a lot lower than what employees feel they are worth, which is creating a gap in expectations that employers will have to manage sensitively.”

A survey of 1000 people by HR platform Employment Hero in September found 48 per cent of Australian workers planned to look for a new job in the next six months and 15 per cent were already looking for a new job. Nearly half said a pay rise would entice them to stay.

John Buchanan, a business professor at the University of Sydney, said when employers talked about skill shortages it was often code for them not wanting to pay market rates or improve conditions. For example, it was often said there was a nursing shortage or a lack of trained chefs, yet there were plenty of qualified nurses or chefs not working in those occupations.

“They try and bring cheap labour from overseas because they don’t want price as an allocative mechanism, so they intervene on the quantity side,” Professor Buchanan said.

“They report skill shortages because they advertise at the wage they want to pay and offer no training, then unsurprisingly they can’t find people.”

Mr Tindale said some employers were trying to snap back to pre-pandemic norms and get staff back in the office but workers were pushing back.

“In a survey of workers in Australia, at least 20 per cent of the respondents said they were either considering resigning or had resigned from a role if not offered flexibility,” he said.

Employees were barely changing jobs at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, with many focused on retaining employment and adjusting to working from home. ABS job mobility figures released in July show 975,000 people, or 7.5 per cent of employed, changed jobs in the year to February 2021, the lowest annual job mobility rate on record.

The ABS job mobility data won’t be updated for some time, but the LinkedIn figures suggest employees, especially in white-collar jobs, are taking advantage of the tight labour market to secure better working conditions, pay rises or more interesting work. Men and women were equally likely to have changed jobs in Australia.

LinkedIn has 12 million members in Australia, a high proportion of the workforce, though its membership is more weighted to professional and managerial jobs, and does not perfectly reflect the workforce as a whole. The figures are based on a rolling three-month total and adjust for account membership growth.

Competition for jobs was down 63 per cent in Australia compared with a year ago, based on the platform’s metrics, putting jobseekers in a stronger negotiating position.

ABS figures show one in five businesses reported job vacancies in August, compared with one in eight in August 2020. Three out of four of the vacancies were to replace someone who had resigned.

Professor Buchanan analysed the August job vacancy figures alongside the labour account release for June and found four industries accounted for 153,3000 â€" nearly half â€" of the vacancies.

The sector with the most vacancies was health care, with 51,200 job openings in August despite a reduction of 27,000 jobs in the June quarter. Professor Buchanan said this was a sign of churn, with employees quitting because of poor work conditions.

The next biggest sectors for high vacancies were administration and retail, which both had high vacancies off the back of strong growth in jobs.

The final high-vacancy sector was professional services, such as accountancy, law and consulting, which had only marginal growth in jobs. The sector also had high vacancies before the pandemic, suggesting high turnover.

Naomi Worrall from Lismore took voluntary redundancy as a union organiser and opened a cake business called Seasons and Whim.

Naomi Worrall, from Lismore, worked in community services for 10 years and then as a union organiser for 10 years before taking voluntary redundancy a month ago.

She decided to take a few months off and dabble in some cake making, but interest has been so high that it has turned into a business, called Seasons and Whim. It has been a steep learning curve as she has had to do her own carpentry and learn how to run a business.

“There’s something about cakes â€" I’ve not had one single person give me negative feedback about it being a silly idea, which I found surprising because usually people are happy to point out the flaws in your plan,” Ms Worrall said. “Everyone’s been overwhelmingly positive.”

Fiona Sives from Croydon in Sydney quit her administration job at a large medical devices company in July to join a start-up medical devices company, EMVision Medical Devices.

She was at the previous company for 15 years and the main reason she left was because of lack of opportunity to develop and grow.

“I had applied for seven roles internally over the last two and a half years that I was there, all unsuccessfully, and it was breaking my heart,” Ms Sives said.

“[With my new job], it’s more money, I feel more valued, and I’ve got greater scope.

“I’d been thinking about it seriously for about a year, but the pandemic probably did delay me actually doing something about it because I was worried about the stability of the market altogether.”

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