Mark Johnson, Founder, EGM Partners

I think it's a great skill.

It will put her in good stead for sure.

Yeah.

And in terms of the local job market, because, I mean, your day-to-day business is dealing with people looking for jobs and also businesses looking for people.

How do you sort of see it playing out over the next 12, 24 months? Do you think...

Given the economic environment, are things slowing down in South Australia or because of the amount of work and the major projects and the defence that's happening, is South Australia kind of an anomaly amongst the other states?

The thing that will change what I should say is our demographics.

Mm-hmm.

So if our demographics were evenly spread, I'd say unemployment would go up.

And that's because we've hired badly, spent money we don't have, and we've got a perfect storm of things like technology coming in to make efficiencies.

Organisations have got costs of doing business going through the roof, and so the words budget cuts, they're key words.

So you would normally, we're at about 4.5% unemployment, you would normally expect that to go up to about...

I'd expect it to shoot up to about seven, given the GFC that I cut my teeth on in 2008 in London.

That won't happen in South Australia because we've got what I'm calling a retirement cliff.

We're about to have an exodus of people that are in their 60s, leave the workforce.

we haven't invested that well in learning and development over the past 10 years especially last five we've more just been trying to hire and get bums on seats so i actually don't really see unemployment going above five percent because of that yeah people will be leaving the workforce don't get me wrong But I think that a lot of people are going to be leaving.

More people will be leaving that workforce and not returning to it.

So the employable age, which is how we measure that unemployment rate, won't go up as much.

Okay.

That's really interesting.

It is interesting.

Yeah.

And we've had, you know, chats through the committee fair later around that middle management bracket.

And like you said, the fact that a lot of our big companies here have purely just needed people so they've, you know, promoted within and people, you know, who may be technical have landed in managerial roles and the need for them to also be equipped with the leadership and the management skills to Is that something as a state that we need to be looking into?

I think probably what we need to do is look back at what we've done badly.