History teacher Katie Magriplis epitomises Australia's skills and training predicament.
"I've been really looking to kind of change everything about what my life looks like, by changing my job," she said.
"I've been a secondary teacher for 17 years and the workload is really not compatible with the sort of life that I want to have at all."
She is actively looking to change careers completely.
Australian Bureau of Statistics data suggests she is not alone; in fact, during the year to February, nearly a tenth of employed Australians changed jobs.
The OECD predicts that will continue as technology disrupts workplaces and industries, making mid-career upskilling and retraining critical as jobs morph from under us.
In 2020, the Institute for Workplace Skills and Innovation found there were 200,000 vacant jobs due to skills mismatch in Australia.
In the next five years, the greatest demand for workers will be in health and social care, professional and technical jobs, education, hospitality, and construction, the Skills Commission found last year.
As industry leaders from across Australia gather in Canberra for the National Skills Summit, finding ways to fill these gaps will be top of the agenda.
And some experts believe the solutions could be quite simple.
'I don't want to end up thousands of dollars in debt'
Ms Magriplis said she could not afford to pay for another degree, but would be willing to do a short course to leverage her existing literacy skills to start a copywriting business.
"In terms of short courses, I'd be interested in anything that would help me add to the existing skill sets that I have, that I could either use to help in any business that I would run or to even look at other sorts of work," she said.
"What I don't want is to end up in thousands of dollars of debt for something that may or may not improve my ability to either find work or get promoted or anything like that.
"The way the tertiary offerings are structured at the moment, it seems like very much they are geared toward people who are unemployed, or people who want or need university qualifications to get a specific job, and there's not really much in between."
Unlikely bedfellows across business, the training sector and unions have said a key solution is making mid-career upskilling easier.
One way of doing that is easing access to short courses known as "micro-credentials", through both TAFE and universities.
The courses are short and focus intensely on a particular niche, or technical skill — think a short computer coding course, or the basics of starting a business.
They are shorter than traditional certificate and diploma courses, and depending on the institution cost in the hundreds to thousands of dollars.
At the moment, students have to pay up front for these short courses.
Peak body Universities Australia thinks funding FEE-HELP loans for university micro-credentials will help fix the crunch.
Chief executive Catriona Jackson is pitching it as a priority ask of the government at its national Jobs and Skills Summit on Thursday.
"The days in which you had a career for life are absolutely over," she said.
"A micro credential doesn't replace a foundational degree or a foundational qualification, but it adds things on top.
"We're asking the government to consider attaching a HECS and income contingent loan to that so you don't have to pay now."
Agreement TAFE needs help
An even larger coalition including the The Australian Council of Trade Unions and multiple business groups are calling for boosted funding for TAFE to deliver similar courses as well as better apprenticeship wages.
In its submission to the federal government, the Australian Education Union said funding cuts to TAFE under the Coalition had significantly diminished its ability to provide adequate services.
The union said TAFE was critical to addressing skill shortages.
"The National Skills Commission has consistently recorded extreme shortages in many essential trade and technical industries," the union's submission said.
"[The Australian Children's Education & Care Quality Authority] has identified a need for an additional 39,000 early childhood educators including 9,000 additional early childhood teachers by 2023.
"The latest 2021 apprenticeship and traineeship completion data shows that completions have declined to 48.1 per cent of all occupations and 42.0 per cent for trade occupations."
Peak body TAFE Directors Australia wants funding and mentoring support increased for at least the first year, to improve apprentice retention rates.
Funding in fossil-fuel-exposed areas critical
UniSA's Centre for Workplace Excellence co-director, Associate Professor Sukhbir Sandhu, said funding to upskill jobs in places transitioning away from fossil fuel industries was also crucial to meet demand for the growing clean energy sector.
"We're going to lose about 10,000 jobs in Australia in coal mining [by 2035]," Dr Sandhu said.
"In jobs such as construction and project managers, office administrators, drivers, it's an easy transition towards renewable energy.
"There are other jobs such as drillers in coal mines, which cannot easily make the transition and will need upskilling."
Jobs in the clean energy sector were predicted to outstrip losses from jobs in domestic coal generation, making the demand for retraining even greater, she said.
