Workforce Intelligence

Why this mattered

Australia’s care and support workforce is experiencing one of the largest labour market transformations in the nation’s history.

Driven by an ageing population, the rapid expansion of disability services and growing demand for health and community care, workforce shortages have become one of the most significant challenges facing governments, employers and communities.

Recognising the scale of this emerging issue, HSSO commissioned leading demographers Bernard Salt AM and Simon Kuestenmacher from The Demographics Group to analyse the newly released 2021 Census and identify what it revealed about Australia’s future care workforce. The result was The Big Care Shift—a landmark analysis of the demographic forces reshaping the care economy and the workforce required to sustain it.

HSSO’s Role

HSSO commissioned and led this strategic workforce analysis to provide governments, industry and workforce leaders with an evidence-based understanding of the unprecedented growth occurring across Australia’s care and support workforce.

Working with The Demographics Group, HSSO translated complex Census and labour market data into practical workforce insights, highlighting the implications for workforce planning, training, migration, education and future investment.

Rather than simply describing workforce shortages, the report challenged policy makers to understand the structural demographic forces driving demand and the need for coordinated, long-term workforce solutions.

What We Discovered

The analysis demonstrated that Australia is experiencing a fundamental shift in the structure of its workforce.

Among the report’s key findings were:

• Aged and Disability Carer became Australia’s fastest-growing occupation, increasing by more than 95,000 workers between the 2016 and 2021 Census—more than three times the growth of the next fastest-growing occupation.
• Health Care and Social Assistance became Australia’s largest employing industry, accounting for around one in every seven Australian workers after adding approximately 600,000 workers over the previous decade.
• Workforce demand was expanding across almost every care occupation, demonstrating that shortages were not isolated to aged care but reflected system-wide growth across disability, childcare, allied health and community services.
• Demand varied significantly across Australia, with regional and retirement communities requiring substantially larger proportions of care workers than many metropolitan and resource-based communities, highlighting the importance of place-based workforce planning.

Looking Beyond Today’s Workforce

The report also looked beyond current workforce shortages to examine the demographic forces shaping future demand.

It found that Australia is approaching a period of unprecedented growth in the population aged over 80 years, while demand for disability services continues to increase. At the same time, global competition for skilled migrants is expected to intensify, meaning migration alone cannot meet Australia’s future workforce needs.

The report concluded that building the future care workforce will require coordinated investment across education, workforce development, migration, technology, productivity and workforce retention—not simply increased recruitment.

Why It Matters

The Big Care Shift helped reposition workforce shortages as a long-term demographic challenge rather than a short-term labour market issue.

Its findings have continued to inform workforce discussions across aged care, disability, human services and vocational education by demonstrating that Australia’s future prosperity depends on building a larger, more skilled and more sustainable care workforce.

The report reinforced HSSO’s role as a trusted source of workforce intelligence, combining demographic analysis with practical insights to support evidence-based workforce policy and planning.