Wholesale and Retail

How will technology evolve the sector?

The rapid uptake of ecommerce services within Australia is placing pressure on all retailers to improve customer experience and overall service levels, with particular emphasis on greater personalisation. This is creating significant requirements for skills in digital systems design, programming, data analytics and artificial intelligence to improve services and enable retailers to be more responsive to customer needs.

Increasing competition is also driving the need for service improvement in the offline world, fuelling demand for improved interpersonal skills on the shop floor. At the same time, the need to reduce margins without diminishing service levels is pushing the requirement for skills in systems process redesign and technology driven automation, especially in warehousing and logistics roles, as employees are moved away from low-value roles.

How will the demand for wholesale and retail workers change over the next decade?

The wholesale and retail sector is a major employer, with more than one million workers in 2018. It incorporates a diverse range of occupations.

Many are characterised by tasks that are highly vulnerable to automation, such as routine communication with colleagues and customers. But many occupations in the sector demand less automatable tasks, such as making human connections and interacting with computers. Over the next decade, we expect a rise in consumer spending to offset the automation effect on jobs in this sector.

We predict over 8% growth in demand for customer service providers – a larger category that includes positions such as shop sales assistants and beauticians. This is because the increase in demand for the services they provide outweighs the jobs impact of the productivity improvements technology will bring. These and other jobs in this sector will evolve around technology to focus more heavily on less automatable tasks, such as resolving conflicts, assisting others and thinking creatively as well as digital tasks such as interacting with computers. We predict that other occupations, such as retail managers and stock clerks will experience a net reduction.

The future of jobs and skills needed

How widespread are skills shortfalls for new entrants to this sector?

The predicted net growth in demand for workers in this sector will require candidates to be drawn in from across the wider workforce. Our analysis suggests the talent pool likely to fill this gap is short of the appropriate skills.

We predict just under half the workers most likely to fill these roles will need to materially upgrade their service orientation and critical thinking skills, amongst others. However, the nature of work and the structure of the labour market means the breadth of the reskilling challenge is less impactful than for most other sectors.

Our analysis suggests that, in a sector becoming increasingly digitalised, there is an insufficient supply of technical skills in the available talent pool. In particular, prospective workers are significantly under skilled in programming skills, falling 59% short of the required skill proficiency. Science and technology design skills represent the next two most acute reskilling challenges. Although the acute skills challenges in Fig. 3 refer to a small subset of the workforce, their size and importance pose a significant challenge.