About the data

Where the numbers come from, what's official, and what's our read.

Everything on this site starts with the Australian Government's own numbers. We don't invent demand data — we translate it. This page shows the working, so you can check anything we say against the source.

The source: Jobs and Skills Australia

The shortage ratings on every occupation page come from the Occupation Shortage List published by Jobs and Skills Australia (JSA), the government body that measures which occupations are short of workers. JSA rates each occupation nationally and state by state — the ratings you see here are from the 2025 list. Our labour-market signals (like vacancy fill rates and relative earnings) draw on JSA's companion Occupation Shortage Drivers analysis.

The ratings are JSA's, not ours. If an occupation shows "Shortage" on this site, that's the government's assessment, reproduced faithfully. We link to the source so you can verify it.

What's ours — and labelled

Anywhere we go beyond the official data, we say so on the page. The main ones:

• The "harder for AI to replace" read. Our editorial judgment based on the kind of work an occupation involves — hands-on, in-person, non-routine work versus routine screen-based work. It's not a JSA rating and not a prediction, and it's labelled that way wherever it appears.
• Plain-English summaries. The verdicts, trend narratives, and "what this means" copy are ours. The underlying numbers are the government's.

How often it updates

JSA publishes the Occupation Shortage List once a year, usually toward the end of the year. We refresh the site when each new list lands, and every page shows which year's list it's built on. Between releases the ratings don't change — so treat them as a yearly snapshot, not a live feed.

Underlying sources

JSA's analysis is itself built on data collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and JSA's own employer surveys. Where earnings or employment figures appear on this site, they ultimately trace back to those ABS series via JSA's published analysis. ABS material is © Commonwealth of Australia.

The one-line "what they actually do" description on each occupation profile comes from the ABS's Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations (ANZSCO), 2022 (Australian Update). We trim a trailing licensing/registration sentence from most of these to keep them to one line — what you're reading is a lightly edited summary, not the ABS's word-for-word text. Follow the ANZSCO link above for the full, untrimmed classification. Licensed by the ABS under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), © Commonwealth of Australia.

The honest fine print

This site is information, not advice. A shortage rating tells you about demand across the country — it can't tell you whether a particular path is right for your kid, or for you. Check the source data, and talk to people qualified to advise on your situation before the big decisions.