The jobs market in Australia has been uncertain for a few years now, with the aftermath of the mining boom's cooling off leaving many wondering where the next wave of new jobs would come from. However, while we've all been on the lookout for the next industry that was going to take off in a big way, it seems that a quieter and less flamboyant area of the market has been adding jobs under the radar to give stability to the employment nationwide.
Employment across Australia is improving to the extent that unemployment now sits just above the target of six per cent or less, and new figures suggest that in the last half decade, it has been the improved health of new start businesses that has helped this become a reality.
According to a report from the Office of the Chief Economist, in the last five years, start up companies in the nation have created somewhere in the region of a million jobs, helping add new positions across the country.
The report states that even though start up businesses account for merely 15 per cent of the workforce nationwide, as a sector in its own right it has created 40 per cent of the new jobs that have come to the market in the last five years. This shows the impact that new companies have in the economy and how important it can be to the growing of the economy as a whole.
The head of innovation services at KPMG, James Mabbott, said that this new data was evidence of the power of the new wave of technology companies and what they can do to help the country as a whole grow in the next few years.
“It’s the hi-tech, high-growth start-ups which provide the greatest level of job creation. This will hopefully help to differentiate start-ups in the minds of policymakers and the general public from small business at large,” he said.
However, he also warned that more needs to be done moving forward to ensure that the number of start ups does not fall, especially with new data suggesting that there has been something of a decline over the course of the last few months.
