Jobs are moving overseas
Over the years there has been a spike in Australian jobs being offshored to other countries. Where companies have decided to move their operations or roles overseas in order to find more efficient processes and a better bottom line.
This means that over time there are less jobs available in certain sectors. Particularly affecting professional services (particularly IT and other tech roles), healthcare, manufacturing, customer service, finance and accounting, and the digital marketing.
In this article we will explore offshoring, why it is happening, and the long-term implications if it doesn’t slow down.
Commonwealth lies about offshoring
This year the Commonwealth Bank of Australia admitted to offshoring two of its roles. This was particularly surprising as they had initially denied offshoring and replacing Australian jobs after making employees redundant.
In June 2025, the Bank had announced 283 redundancies. Affecting mainly their technology and retail teams. The Finance Sector Union (FSU) had looked into the redundancies and argued that at least 15 were not genuine redundancies. To be a genuine redundancy, the role would not be filled by anyone else. However, the FSU argued that some roles had just been offshore to the Bank’s Indian branch.
The FSU made a complaint to the Fair Work Commission arguing that some redundancies were not genuine. It was found that two roles which were originally done in Australia were moved to India.
The FSU scrutinized the bank’s attempt to secretly offshore these jobs. Without them challenging the bank the jobs would have disappeared without any safeguards. That there were larger concerns of accountability and transparency of where Australian jobs are moving to.
Banking
The entire banking sector has had thousands of redundancies over the past year. NAB had made 400 staff redundant in their technology division. Then ANZ had announced 3500 redundancies, for example. However, they are not the only banks affected.
The big banks aren’t the only ones making people redundant. Many of Australia’s largest organisations have come out either planning their redundancies, or speculating that they may occur soon.
There are multiple reasons why the big companies are going through mass redundancies. Naturally, there are economic factors such as inflation that motivates companies to cut costs where possible. With the cost of living and resources continuously rising companies are trying to protect their bottom line.
Additionally, companies are constantly implementing structural and technological advancements, such as AI and digitalization. As technology advances more redundant and simplistic roles are becoming unnecessary for a human to complete.
Talent shortage
According to industry professionals, one reason why Australia is offshoring jobs is because of a talent and skill shortage. This means that there are pockets of professions and roles that Australian businesses are not able to fill as the hiring pool does not have the required experience or accreditation in order to complete the role.
One of those industries is technology. Where they’re struggling to fill roles for cyber security and software engineering. They theorize the reason for this skill gap is due to long training periods and gender imbalances.
Another area of importance is education. A part of the 2024 AEU State of our Schools survey, 51% of principals said it had “become much harder to suitably fill staff vacancies across all areas of the curriculum“. This might be due to a misplacement between employment and university degrees. Where students are being taught theoretical skills, however they lack workplace skills to help set them up for success long term.
This gap in skills may be due to the rigorous requirements of the university degree without the adequate support. For example, the requirement to complete hundreds of hours of unpaid placement. Many students struggle to fulfill this requirement due to the cost of living crisis. These placement requirements are often inflexible and require students to work full time while studying.
To combat skill shortages companies are looking overseas for their hiring pool. This is said to improve efficiency and ensure that the correct qualifications are being hired. Some also consider offshoring a positive buy easing more automated processes for the Australian employee.
Training
There is clearly a disconnect between education and real jobs. Furthermore, the university system does not replicate a workplace lifestyle. Therefore, students have to learn a new way of life when entering the workforce.
Some universities combat this issue by mandating a minimum amount of placement days or total number of placement hours. However, as previously explained these placements are often unpaid and hard to pass. Not due to technical skill but its requirement to be free full time, while supplementing income with other work, and studying.
Other businesses try to resolve this issue through grad roles and internal training. However, these roles are becoming more competitive and decreasing in number. Noting that Australian graduates are also competing against international students.
Over time less companies are willing to take the time and resources to train their graduates. There is a growing expectation that graduates have more experience prior to entering the workforce and are ready to “hit the ground running”.
Additionally, internal training can create problems as companies train their graduates to their specific company requirements. Meaning that these individuals may not be desirable to other companies. Or in some occasions not allowed to be hired by competitors due to their insider knowledge.
One way that the legal system bypasses this issue is by requiring students to pass a diploma of legal training prior to being admitted. This is a postgraduate qualification that teaches graduates how to be a “whole lawyer”. This type of qualification does not only focus on technical skill but teaches graduates what to expect at firms and prepares them for their first day at a law firm.
Job hierarchy
There are general expectations to learn on the job and to be promoted when roles become available. However, offshoring creates a unique problem that disrupts the traditional workplace hierarchy. If roles such as middle management, or even entry level jobs, are being offshored then there is a displacement on who and how tasks are taught.
In an ideal world, a manager will mentor a junior employee to be able to fill their role once that manager leaves. However, if a role is offshored then there’s less opportunity to mentor the new generation of employees.
In a similar issue, if entry level jobs are offshored, then it’s going to be harder to find employees to manage into middle management positions. The job hierarchy relies on the ability for departments and different roles to intermingle. With offshoring likely to only exacerbate the skill gap.
Lack of job opportunity
Not only are jobs being taken away from Australians, large international opportunities are overlooking Australia when deciding where to build large scale projects and infrastructure. These jobs and projects are being awarded to other countries particularly in Southeast Asia
As a nation, Australia has been declining in our economic complexity. Meaning that we don’t have a diversity of exports. We are no longer a manufacturing hub and are failing to compete with our neighbours.
International companies are choosing to manufacture in South East Asian countries due to their low labor and energy costs. Furthermore, Australia has a complex employment law system which may deter international investors. New legislation, such as the right disconnect, has had some discourse as it may deter businesses and lead then to prefer countries that have more relaxed systems.
Ethical concerns and risks
As companies continue to offshore work there are increasingly more ethical risks and concerns attached to offshoring. Firstly there are risks to data security. This is particularly an issue if there are inadequate security controls, insufficient staff training, a lack of oversight from the company, communication gaps, and dependant on the quality of cyber attacks.
This risk was seen recently with the Qantas data breach that resulted in the details of 5.7 million customers being leaked. The breach was said to be due to the offshoring of a Manila-based call center. The hackers were able to convince the center to provide access to their sales system.
Due to the lack of oversight, it’s possible that Australian details have now entered the dark web including phone numbers and birthdays. However, it is said that the attack presents as less of a risk to individuals as the details leaked are more surface level.
It’s important to know that Australian companies are required to be held to a certain standard when your data is provided to an offshore entity. The Australian companies still remain accountable to ensure that the data is kept safe and away from hackers even when offshored. However, when offshored there are more risk that something can go wrong.
Business misconduct
There are also overarching ethical concerns when businesses prefer to offshore rather than higher locally. When offshoring there are great opportunities for businesses to missclassify employment in order to avoid paying for entitlements or to even underpay employees.
This is a long-term problem for two reasons. Firstly, if Australian companies are caught breaching employment laws and trying to avoid their employer responsibilities it will continue to negatively impact the Australian work market if those companies are hit with heavy fines and are not able to recover.
It’s irresponsible for these companies to try and “play the system” by offshoring work. And only risks even more Australian companies going through insolvency.
Secondly, offshoring can create a negative connotation and impact our reputation as a nation. There is already some connotation as locals are seeing their jobs disappear with the impact of job displacement. However, this may also have an international effect where other countries don’t want to invest in Australian employees because Australia is not investing within itself.
Is your job being offshored?
While many employees do not have to worry about offshoring, it is still something to keep an eye out for. Without staying diligent employees can be made falsely redundant when work should still be available to them. Furthermore, it is important to understand offshoring so that employees can remain relevant in the employment landscape.
If employees are not diligent work can be taken away with no backup plan. Employees should always be learning and improving their skills to remian relevant even if dismissed or made redundant.
At A Whole New Approach are not lawyers, nor do we want to be. We are Australia’s leading representatives on anything and everything to do with the workplace. All Fair Work Commission matters, including being forced to resign or around non-genuine redundancies call us immediately.
1800 333 666, its a free, prompt, and confidential call.
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