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Missing links: connections between qualifications and job roles in awards

Modern awards directly determine the pay and employment conditions of around one in five Australian workers and indirectly influence many more by setting the standard for enterprise agreements. This paper examines the relationship between formal qualifications within the Australian Qualifications Framework, job roles and pay rates in Australia’s 122 modern awards. These institutional linkages are key mechanisms connecting skills acquisition through education and training with production processes and pay outcomes. More than a quarter of awards make no connections at all between classifications and qualifications while only a quarter feature strong linkages. In most awards, the connections are relatively loose and there is also strong variation by industry. Notably many modern awards in the fast-growing service industries contain few or no connections. Despite the growing importance of non-technical skills and university-level education, references to qualifications across the modern award system overall are predominantly to trade-level Certificate III qualifications. The results suggest that the current structure of awards will do little to promote further skills acquisition among most of the award-reliant workforce.