Our key message
A skills-first system must recognise skills wherever they are developed – through degrees, creative practice, work experience, community leadership, or international qualifications – and give employers and workers a shared language to describe them.
“HASS graduates possess skills in critical thinking, ethics, creativity, analysis and the capacity to see the implications of policy, social acceptance, social cohesion and relative disadvantage in shaping community and consumer expectations. A taxonomy that acknowledges that these skills can be developed to an equivalent level across different educational experiences will help employers to better identify potential employees who have the people, context and technical skills needed in the contemporary workforce.”
HASS in the National Skills Taxonomy (NST):
Our submission argues that a National Skills Taxonomy should:
- Recognise the full breadth of humanities capabilities – including critical thinking, ethical reasoning, creativity, cultural competence and socio-technical literacy – as foundational to effective decision-making, innovation and social cohesion.
- Separate skills from qualifications within the NST, so that graduates from degrees such as the Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Creative Arts can clearly demonstrate the skills they have developed, even where a direct occupational title is not embedded in the qualification.
- Align higher education learning outcomes with the taxonomy, enabling universities to map the skills developed in their courses to nationally recognised skill definitions, helping employers advertise roles in terms of the skills they need.
Medium-term graduate outcomes show that humanities, culture and social sciences graduates achieve employment rates comparable with, and in some cases ahead of, graduates in other fields — underscoring the economic and social value of humanities skills.
Supporting inclusion & mobility
We emphasise that a skills-first system must not create new barriers. Instead, it should:
- Better recognise skills gained overseas, enabling migrants and refugees – including those qualified in areas of Australian skills shortage – to have their skills recognised beyond narrow occupation categories or English-language proxies.
- Acknowledge precarious and fragmented work histories, ensuring that people in casual and insecure roles can have their real skills recognised and build pathways to secure employment.
Building socio-technical literacy & AI capability
Drawing on the Academy’s Future Humanities Workforce project, our submission highlights the need to bring technical and humanistic skills together, particularly in the context of the rapid growth of artificial intelligence:
- Data and technical literacy in the humanities is critical for understanding the ethical, cultural and social implications of digital technologies.
- Sociotechnical literacy – the ability to move between technical possibilities and cultural implications – should be recognised as a key capability in the taxonomy.
- We propose that the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC) be mandated to take a national, HASS–STEM integrated approach to AI as a sovereign capability, building both functional and critical literacies for the future workforce.
Governance, regulation & future evolution
To remain effective over time, the NST will need:
- Mechanisms to resolve disputes and overlaps between regulated trade qualifications and skills developed through artistic and creative practice (for example, welding in sculpture, or lighting and design in digital arts).
- Regulatory harmonisation between state and Commonwealth frameworks so that the intent of a skills-first approach is realised in practice.
- A validated process for updating and refining skills definitions as new industries emerge and as convergences between disciplines (such as digital humanities and computing) deepen, without fragmenting the overall framework.
Download our submission
Download the Academy’s submission to Jobs and Skills Australia on the National Skills Taxonomy.
