CICA’s response to the Shaping the Future of Employment Services discussion paper
The Australian Government’s reform of mainstream employment services is the most significant rethink of the system in years, and CICA has welcomed it. The move from a standardised model to three streams calibrated to a person’s circumstances, the stronger emphasis on progress and sustainable outcomes, and the commitment to better assessment are all consistent with established career development practice.
Our position on the Discussion Paper is straightforward. Read the reform closely and you find that many of its central proposals are, in substance, career development functions.
The career mapping and guidance tools proposed for the online stream. The Employment Goal Plan. The redesigned assessment and reassessment process. The focus on frontline capability. Each of these depends on the discipline that connects a person’s circumstances, skills and aspirations to realistic pathways and suitable work. They will deliver what the reform intends only if qualified career development practice is embedded across the system.
Australia already owns what this reform requires
This is not a case for building something new. The Professional Standards for Australian Career Development Practitioners (5th ed., 2026), the Guiding Principles for Career Development Services and Career Information Products (3rd ed., 2026), the Register of Professional Career Development Practitioners, and the Australian Blueprint for Career Development together provide a recognised national benchmark for capability, ethics and quality. The opportunity now is to put those assets to work rather than build the equivalent again from scratch.
The international evidence points the same way. The study of public employment services worldwide by WAPES, the ICCDPP and the University of Derby found that career guidance works best when it is referenced in policy, delivered by qualified staff and properly resourced, and that the lack of qualified and trained career guidance staff is the single largest barrier to effective delivery. That finding speaks directly to the design choices Australia is making now.
The money is already committed
The 2026-27 Budget has put substantial funding behind functions that are, in substance, career development: $205.5 million for online career-mapping and guidance tools, $27.5 million for assessment and triaging, and $52.6 million behind the early intensive services trial, with the Employment Goal Plan piloted alongside.
The risk is familiar. Investing in artificial-intelligence-assisted career tools and a new planning instrument without the professional standards and qualified staff that make them work is how earlier reforms have underdelivered. Embedding established career development practice is not an additional cost item. It is assurance on money already allocated.
There is a cost story on the other side as well. With 22.7 per cent of Workforce Australia Services participants reaching a sustainable outcome and around one in six re-entering within a year, better job suitability reduces churn and the recurring expense that churn carries.
Career development belongs in all three streams
CICA supports the three calibrated streams, and recommends that career development support be present across all of them, scaled by intensity rather than concentrated in one.
In online and brief intervention services, that means high-quality self-help career and labour market information, career mapping and exploration tools, brief guidance interventions and proactive contact. In targeted provider services, it means active career coaching, development of the Employment Goal Plan, brokerage of skills and training aligned to local demand, identification of transferable skills and post-placement support. In intensive services, it means relational career development, mentoring, work-like experience and volunteering, recognition of prior learning and coordinated wrap-around support.
Stream placement should rest on a holistic assessment of both a person’s distance from the labour market and their career readiness, not on numerical job-readiness scoring alone. Career readiness is what separates the people who can self-manage a job search online from those who need active coaching. The Discussion Paper’s own data, where around one in nine people in online services opt out to a provider and around one in eight reach the maximum time before referral, suggests current placement does not always match need.
The workforce is the determining factor
Frontline capability is the single most important determinant of service quality, so the reform’s success depends on who delivers it.
CICA has recommended stream-based qualification and capability standards drawing on the Professional Standards and the Register, with professional registration considered as a condition of delivering funded career development services, and continuing professional development expected and resourced.
A tiered workforce makes this achievable at scale. Specialist practitioners lead complex servicing, assessment and Employment Goal Plan development. The broader frontline workforce, including Australian Public Service contact-centre staff in the online stream, can be equipped through accessible online professional learning to hold meaningful career conversations as part of everyday servicing. CICA is well placed to develop or accredit that learning.
It matters for the people doing the work, not only for the system. In the current model, frontline staff are too often positioned as administrators of obligations rather than skilled practitioners, applying numerical scores that can produce referrals they know are wrong. Defining the role around career development gives them a recognised skill set, the professional authority to exercise judgment, a credential, and a career of their own. The Select Committee identified the difficulty of attracting and retaining a suitably qualified workforce. Capability is not an overhead the reform has to carry. It is what keeps experienced staff in the role.
The Employment Goal Plan has to be a real plan
The Employment Goal Plan is, in effect, a career action plan, and developing career action plans with clients is core career development practice. CICA strongly supports its introduction.
The risk is that it becomes a compliance artefact like the Job Plan it replaces. Two safeguards reduce that risk. Incentives and performance measures should recognise the quality of pathway planning and progress against the plan, not only final placement. And participants should experience the plan as their own, written in plain language, genuinely co-authored, aligned to the Australian Blueprint and portable so the information follows the person.
Availability alone is not the point. The OECD’s survey of career guidance for adults found that while around four in ten adults had used career guidance in the previous five years, only about one in five considered it useful in achieving a concrete outcome such as finding a job or enrolling in training. Quality determines impact, which is exactly why the plan needs capable practitioners behind it.
Measure what actually moves people towards work
What gets measured shapes behaviour on both sides of the service. The current tendency to reward rapid placement over suitability contributes to the poor job fit and churn the Discussion Paper identifies.
Progress towards employment can be measured using established career development constructs: career management skills aligned to the Australian Blueprint, career readiness, self-efficacy and confidence, clarified goals, skills attained, and completion of work-like experience. In intensive services, where progress is incremental and non-linear, measurement should give greater weight to intermediate progress over longer horizons while keeping suitable employment as the ultimate goal. A national evidence framework for career guidance outcomes, which Jobs and Skills Australia is well placed to support, would underpin consistent measurement across the system.
On digital tools, the career mapping and guidance tools proposed for the online stream, including any use of artificial intelligence, should meet quality and ethical standards consistent with CICA’s Guiding Principles and retain human oversight. AI-assisted tools can narrow aspirations, embed bias and rely on labour market data that is out of date. They should be designed with professional input and with the people who will use them, evaluated for accuracy and bias, kept transparent, and supported by a clear route to a practitioner.
One part of a longer journey
Employment services are one part of a person’s lifelong career journey, alongside school career education, tertiary education and support for workers managing change. In March 2026 CICA published A National Framework for Lifelong Career Guidance in Australia, which argues that Australia has capable practitioners, credible professional standards, the Register and a refreshed Blueprint, but lacks the national policy architecture to connect them. Aligning this reform with that framework, including professional workforce standards, a national evidence framework, and coordination across the Education, Skills and Training, and Employment and Workplace Relations portfolios, would strengthen coherence and reduce duplication.
Where CICA sits in this
CICA’s interest in this reform is the quality of career development practice across the system, not the delivery of funded services. As custodian of Australia’s national professional infrastructure for career development, CICA can bring independent expertise to the design work now underway, particularly on the Employment Goal Plan, a stream-based capability framework for frontline staff, quality and ethical standards for career development services and digital tools, and the measurement of progress towards employment.
The central recommendation is simple enough to state in a sentence. Career development should be treated as a defined service element across all three streams, calibrated by intensity, and it should be delivered by appropriately qualified staff. Everything else follows from that.
