Dr Sam Wylie

So you need to plan ahead about your long time that you'll be spending in the workforce.

And it means that you need to stay current with skills.

You need to think that I need to have skills that are in demand in the workforce.

And, you know, when I was your age, people would do a trade or they'd go to university or something, and then they'd get the skills that they would expect to use through the whole of their career.

Well, that's out the window now.

So the same thing, do a trade or go to university, get skilled up, but then you have to stay skilled up continually.

work on developing the skills that are needed in the economy.

Otherwise, just the pace of technological change means that you'll be sidelined at some stage.

And it'll either be hard to find employment or it'll be relatively low-income employment.

So, you know, what to do to prepare?

Well, now I'm talking about, you know, multi-decade thing or long-term strategy as opposed to the circumstances surrounding COVID-19.

But I think that's super important.

And then a second thing is, as well as upskilling, a second thing is to remain flexible.

to be prepared to move jobs or into new areas.

And that's a state of mind, being flexible, but also being flexible in terms of being prepared to move from cities, to move from Brisbane to Melbourne, or to move from Sydney to Perth, to be flexible in your arrangements, to upskill and to be flexible.

I think that those are really key things.

Part of the reason that inflation is not...

going into increases in wages.

So we haven't seen, like I was saying just a moment ago, that inflation's up 5.1%, consumer price index, but wages are only up 3%.

Now, there's more than one reason for that.