This Week in Australian Startups - Issue #23, 31st May 2023

May 31, 2023

The Tech Council of Australia yesterday launched it’s Tech Jobs Update report, highlighting how we are progressing to our national goal of 1.2 million tech workers by 2030.

A key theme of the report is the delineation between direct and indirect tech jobs. Direct tech includes traditional tech industries you would think of, and indirect including industries such as retail, banking & financial services and mining where the individual role is a tech job such as a software engineer.

Australia’s traditional industries, like banking, government and education, are driving tech jobs growth not just because these industries are growing, but because they are becoming more tech intensive. Since 2011, the tech intensity of the Finance industry has almost doubled. This is measured by the share of workers in the Finance industry that work in tech occupations, which has risen from 10% in 2011 to 18% in 2023.

Globally the growing trend of ‘legacy’ companies snapping up more tech talent has been going on for some time. JP Morgan has been long touted as the world’s largest python employer and perhaps even the most software engineers. As ‘direct tech’ slims down with widespread layoffs, ‘indirect tech’ is growing with the eat or be eaten mantra driving reinvention and a quest to stay relevant

At home in Australia it doesn’t seem to be that different with the report showing that 78% of all tech jobs in the last 3 months came from this indirect tech sector, and currently 62% of tech workers also fall in the same category.

Total growth in tech jobs was 8%, double that of all other jobs in the past year taking the total to 935,000. This makes the tech workforce the 7th largest industry in Australia.

There’s still a gap, however, to hit that 1.2 million number and in general a lack of skills, talent and experience in the Australian tech ecosystem.

Large corporates have established their own (re)training programs, CBA and WooliesX noted in the report. NAB also rolled out its own program in partnership with AWS enrolling 500 women to become cloud certified.

Training is going to be huge opportunity, universities have consistently been losing their relevancy in the modern workforce, and in particular for tech. In order to become a software engineer you can do a bootcamp and learn enough to get a grad job.

In the UK, with the payroll levy, larger companies are mandated in effect by the government to hire apprentices, with Multiverse leading the way through the apprenticeships and a new model for education.

In Australia whilst there are bootcamps available, apprenticeships are usually reserved for tradespeople. Earlywork recently launched a tech sales Academy, guaranteeing a job and helping people to change industries and get into tech - showcasing alumni who were teachers, photographers and even exercise physiologists.

The other opportunity is going to be through migration and repatriation. There’s a lot of great Australian talent working abroad in major tech hubs across the world, gaining deeply valuable experience that we should be trying to bring home - having done this myself working in the UK for 5 years before coming back home. Australia is the best country in the world to live in. Most of our major cities regularly rank in the top 10 most liveable cities every year. Australian’s who work abroad have deep roots and there’s scope for companies to start headhunting talent back home.

The other angle is with the rise of remote work, Australia should be the premier destination for remote talent. Countries like Spain and Indonesia have already introduced digital nomad visa’s - there’s a missed opportunity for us to do something similar.

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Australian Funding Rounds

New Zealand digital teaching aid Education Perfect has acquired a bootstrapped Victorian edtech assessment platform Essential Assessment in a deal believed to be worth $40 million (Startup Daily)
Adelaide enterprise software venture Complexica books $6.5 million (Startup Daily | The Australian)
Female-founded edtech Cleverbean raises $200,000 to reduce teach burnout (Startup Daily)
Paris Hilton and electronica duo The Chainsmokers have been added to the A-lister cap table of LA-based expat Australian startup Checkmate, which has raised $23m in a Series A (Startup Daily | AFR)
Nanosatellite startup Fleet Space raises $50 million Series C (Startup Daily | The Australian)

International Funding Highlights

Sam Altman’s Crypto Project Worldcoin Raises $115M, Led By Blockchain Capital (CoinDesk)
Databricks invests in Catalyst, targeting the elusive customer intelligence category (VentureBeat)
Pluton Biosciences takes its carbon-fixing microbes to market with a fresh $16.6M (TechCrunch)

This Week in Australian Startups

This Week in Australian Startups - Issue #23, 31st May 2023

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Australian Funding Rounds

International Funding Highlights

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