Careers conference addresses rail industry’s labour shortages

By Jennifer Perry

The Australasian Railway Association’s (ARA) Rail Revolution Report found that in order to meet demand and cover attrition and age retirement, rail companies will need to access a staggering 250-340 engineers, 500-700 trades people and 420-700 operations staff every year for the next five years.
The ARA and the Rail Skills and Career Council (RSCC) brought together rail and human resources experts to work on countering these challenges at the recent Rail Careers conference, held in Melbourne on May 26th-27th.
At a time when the rail industry is facing significant skills shortages there is also an increasing demand for passenger and freight services, with every Australian city hitting capacity constraints, the ARA’s chief executive Bryan Nye told conference delegates.
“Plans are being constrained; projects are being delayed because of the inability to get the right people on the ground.
“Every State wants to increase passenger transport and their freight networks and there will be more coming...we have to get going right now,” he said.
There is currently about 110,000 people working in rail or supporting rail in Australia – the industry’s workforce is about two-thirds the size of Australia’s car industry and is made up of 150 different rail companies.
The RSCC’s Rail Careers manager Tania Davies told Rail Express that while Australia’s rail companies are doing “fantastic work” in coming up with ideas and solutions to common workforce development challenges, because they are working in isolation from other rail organisations they often replicate each other’s efforts as they are simply unaware of what each other is doing.
“One of the objectives of the Rail Careers conference and the RSCC is to get likeminded HR professionals together to discuss, network and share information and strategies to reduce this duplication of effort, which will effectively reduce the costs and effort expended on these activities,” she said.
Nye spoke of a number of workforce challenges for rail that are identified in the ARA’s Rail Revolution Report.
“Rail is not seen as an employer of choice, people don’t think it’s nice to go out on the track and get dirty anymore, everybody wants to be in the soft skills areas and yet there is a global skills shortage” he said.
There is also a real problem with workplace relations in the industry.
“It’s a bit controversial but we are still very male dominated, less than two per cent of the workforce are females, the way we treat people is all part of the challenge...and there is a negative perception of the industry - we’re seen as tired old, union dominated...” Nye said.
The ARA came up with nine strategies that address rail’s workforce risks.
The strategies include positioning the culture of rail for the future; attraction and industry image, retaining experienced staff and the knowledge they hold; building new employment and training pathways, and introducing more flexible and innovative work practices and collaboration.
“We’re competing in the marketplace with so many other industries, we’ve got to be seen as being dynamic – part of the challenge is changing the rail culture into a modern industry...rail is not a tired industry...it is an industry of the future...and we want to be seen as a career of choice,” Nye said.
“The rail industry in Australia has an incredibly exciting future – look at the amount of money that’s going in – we’ve got to make sure that we’ve got the people to go forward.
“Companies are now working together which I think is an outstanding achievement – understanding these are industry problems and collobarating to solve them at an industry level.”
The CRC for Rail Innovation is currently progressing research on workforce development in the rail industry including projects that address attraction and industry image; skilled migration; staff retention and engagement, and leadership and management development.

For further information on these and other CRC workforce development projects please write to: info@railcrc.net.au or visit: www.railcrc.net.au

For more information about  rail careers and employment opportunities visit: www.ara.net.au