Australia’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been successful relative to comparable countries around the world. However, this success has still come at a cost, with the restrictions put in place to stop the spread of the virus causing widespread economic disruption and significantly impacting the labour market. At the end of May 2020 (the reference period for the 2020 National Student Outcomes Survey), the number of employed persons decreased by 5.4% from the same period in 2019 (ABS 2020). The number of unemployed increased by 30.9% and the labour force participation rate declined by 3.2 percentage points to 62.9%.

The proportion of vocational education and training (VET) students who completed a qualification in 2019 and were employed at the end of May 2020 was 71.6%, this represented a decrease of 5.0 percentage points from the corresponding period in the previous year. The decrease in the proportion of males employed full time was particularly large (-9.1 percentage points), with the decline in full-time employment smaller for females (-5.6% percentage points). The decline in the proportion of qualification completers employed after training from 2019 to 2020 did not translate into a similar increase in the proportion of unemployed, this is due to an increase in the proportion who were not participating in the labour force which was larger for females (4.6 percentage points) than for males (3.4 percentage points).

Unsurprisingly, qualification completers whose employment circumstances were most negatively affected were from fields of education that include nationally recognised training for industries heavily impacted by COVID-19 restrictions. Qualification completers from the broad fields of education of Food, Hospitality and Personal Services; and Creative Arts, had the highest proportions of those employed at the end of May 2020 who were temporarily stood down due to COVID-19 at 16.0% and 14.8% respectively. Qualification completers from these fields of education also had the highest proportion of students who experienced a decrease in working hours since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

While the findings of this report paint a fairly bleak picture in terms of employment outcomes for the VET qualification completers of 2019 compared with previous years, the information presented is for a snapshot in time at the end of May 2020, when national restrictions imposed to control the initial wave of COVID-19 infections were only just beginning to be eased.