At the moment the Telstra billing system needs maintainance. The workers were all retrenched 8 years ago. The outsourcers need 165 developers, with current experience of the Telstra billing system and Cobol. They have been unable to find enough 30+ programmers so they are bringing in 80 Indians. Meanwhile the more than 500+ local applications have been sifted through and rejected.

What experience do these people want for 4 months work?

And why would you pay to study at university for 4 years to compete in such an unpredictable market?

If Australia is serious about encouraging people to get training and education then it needs to protect skilled jobs. So actions like the NSW government changing the emergency flight contractors from Westpac and Careflight to a Canadian outfit need to be questioned and properly justified.

And I don't mean to bag Canada but why does the NSW government audit all new house designs for environmental sustainablity against a Canadian package that hasn't even been modified for the southern hemisphere?

I Completely agree with sparticusss. However I would like to add that the skills shortage in general is the result of general government incompetence (State and Federal, mainly federal), and big business greed.

Big business and its various assorted industries have simply not been training people, saving small amounts of money in the short term and causing larger problems in the long term. They have created their own problems with their own behavior. They have of course (as big business always does) demanded the tax payers help solve this problem. None of this rubbish about leaving it to the market to fix the problem. That type of free market rhetoric is only good for justifying driving down wages or union bashing.

The Federal Government has hardly helped with its chronic underfunding of public and tertiary education.

I'll tell you why there is a shortage of geoscientists, because when I was graduating from university with first class honours in geology in 2000 there were 8,000 geologists out of work. I'm now an economist.