Fewer Australians are experiencing job displacement, with the rate falling from around 6 percent in 2015 to 4 percent in 2025, and job losses shifting towards professional and managerial workers.
Jobs and Skills Australia's new Recent trends for displaced workers in Australia report examines how the industries, occupations and regions most affected by displacement changed over the past decade to 2025.
Displacement rates for workers in traditionally affected industries such as mining, manufacturing and construction have declined, while professional and service-based industries have experienced an increase in redundancy-related displacement, increasingly concentrated in metropolitan Sydney and Melbourne.
The profile of affected workers is changing: post-displacement outcomes are uneven across different types of occupations and even highly skilled professionals in industries like finance, media and IT are not immune to displacement.
Jobs and Skills Australia Deputy Commissioner Trevor Gauld said the findings of the report challenged traditional assumptions about the workers, occupations and communities most exposed to displacement.
"The number of displaced workers has declined, and workers are generally finding new employment more readily and experiencing smaller earnings losses than in the past decade," Mr Gauld said.
"While this report's 2015-2025 stocktake of displacement trends and outcomes does not observe the impacts of emerging technologies such as AI on displacement, it offers a baseline to better understand how those impacts might emerge over time and how we might modernise displacement monitoring or better target supports for displaced workers," Mr Gauld said.
The report is available on the JSA website.
