Professor Ben Fahimnia

Australia has been talking about skills shortages in logistics and supply chain for decades. Despite substantial investment in education and training, and thousands of graduates entering the job market each year, employers continue to struggle to find the capabilities they need.

Perhaps we need to think differently about the problem.

The shortage itself is difficult to dispute. Industry Skills Australia (ISA) identifies access to a skilled workforce as a major priority for Australia's transport and logistics sector. The industry employs approximately 600,000 people, with its workforce projected to grow by approximately 9% over the next decade. The shortage of skilled workers is expected to persist.

But a skills shortage does not necessarily mean a shortage of qualified people.

Jobs and Skills Australia (JSA) identifies the drivers of occupational shortages. A key driver is a “suitability gap”: there may be enough qualified applicants, but employers do not consider enough of them suitable for available positions. JSA identifies employability skills among the potential causes and cautions that simply producing more qualified people is a questionable solution.

This raises an important question: Do we have a shortage of qualified people, or a problem converting qualified graduates into work-ready professionals?

Qualified does not necessarily mean work-ready

Universities have become increasingly sophisticated in what they teach supply chain students. A typical graduate may have studied forecasting, procurement, logistics, supply chain design and planning, optimisation, resilience, sustainability, and, increasingly, AI and data analytics.

These capabilities matter enormously. But knowing how to solve a technical supply chain problem and being able to operate effectively as a supply chain professional are not the same thing.

Supply chain management is inherently interpersonal. Professionals negotiate with suppliers, challenge plans, coordinate across functions, present recommendations to executives, resolve disagreements, and persuade people with competing priorities to work towards a common outcome.

A technically brilliant report has limited organisational value if its author cannot explain it, defend it, convince others, and help implement it.

We often refer to communication, teamwork, confidence, and interpersonal effectiveness as “soft skills”. In reality, these are fundamental professional capabilities. JSA's employer research reinforces this: technical skills matter, but so do experience, attitude, communication, and the ability to work effectively with others.

This is particularly important because international graduates represent a significant source of Australia's future professional workforce. They bring languages, international experience, cultural knowledge, and connections to global markets and supply networks – yet the employment data reveal a striking pattern.

The Australian Government-supported Graduate Outcomes Survey reports that among postgraduate coursework graduates, 85.8% of domestic graduates were in full-time employment shortly after graduation, compared with only 48.2% of international graduates. Three years post-graduation, those figures rise to 93.9% for domestics and 87.6% for internationals.

That convergence raises an important question. What changes during those three years?

The data do not tell us why the gap closes. Many factors may contribute, but the pattern raises an important possibility: some capabilities that international graduates need to succeed develop through professional exposure and integration into Australian workplaces and society. Confidence develops, professional networks expand, and familiarity with workplace language and expectations improves.

If much of this development occurs eventually, why should we leave it until after graduation?

Building the bridge before graduation

Universities have an important responsibility to develop communication, teamwork, and professional capabilities alongside disciplinary knowledge. But there are limits to what a classroom can reproduce.

Confidence and professional communication develop through mentoring and repeated interaction. Professional networks are built through participation in professional communities. Familiarity with Australian workplace culture requires meaningful exposure to workplaces and the people within them.

Universities therefore cannot bridge the gap between academic education and professional practice alone. Developing work-ready graduates requires a shared effort beyond the classroom.

We need an “employability ecosystem” involving universities, industry, professional associations, and professional-development providers.

And that ecosystem needs to engage students early. From the beginning of their studies, students should be encouraged to step outside the classroom through industry mentoring, workplace communication programs, professional networking, volunteering, and other forms of structured professional interaction.

This becomes even more important in the age of AI. Technical knowledge is becoming increasingly accessible. AI can already assist with forecasting, analytics, optimisation, coding, and problem solving. But organisations will still need people who can exercise judgement, communicate uncertainty, build trust, negotiate, collaborate, and lead.

Australia does not simply need more supply chain graduates. We need to become better at converting graduates into supply chain professionals.

Addressing the skills shortage requires us to focus not only on the size of the talent pipeline, but also on what happens between education and employment. Building that bridge earlier may be one of the most important, and perhaps most neglected, investments in Australia's future supply chain capability.