CICA publishes discussion paper on the National Skills Agreement Balanced Scorecard
Jobs and Skills Australia has released the first National Skills Agreement Outcomes Framework Balanced Scorecard. It is the first nationally consistent view of VET system performance under the agreement, and it is candid about where the system is weak. Every one of the ten target measures sits below its agreed minimum for 2028.
CICA has published a discussion paper reading that baseline from a career development perspective. It is available now and is offered as a contribution to the policy conversation among governments, Jobs and Skills Australia, VET sector partners and industry, ahead of the next annual review of the Outcomes Framework.
What the baseline shows
The measures furthest from target have something in common. Employer satisfaction with nationally recognised training is 76.1%, the lowest in a decade and 4.4 percentage points below the minimum target. Improved employment circumstances after training is 58.5%, a gap of 7.6 percentage points, and falling. Employed or in further study after training is 4.6 points below target, also falling. Participation has sat near 11% of the working-age population since 2019, against a stretch target of 13.4%.
Each of these records a judgement about whether training was worth doing, or whether people entered it at all.
The measures that are holding up are largely about volume. Completions aligned to occupations in national shortage rose about 26% between 2020 and 2024. Completions linked to NSA national priorities rose about 45% over the same period. The share of VET-pathway occupations in national shortage fell from 33% in 2023 to 27% in 2025.
The system is producing more training in the right areas. Users are becoming less satisfied with it and less likely to report a labour market benefit from it.
Career guidance is named as a driver and then not measured
The Balanced Scorecard’s commentary on what is driving results names career guidance, career navigation, careers information or informed career choice as enabling conditions in five of the nine outcomes, including all four population outcomes. Outcome 3 states plainly that limited targeted career guidance continues to influence women’s career choices. Outcome 6 identifies limited access to effective careers information as a constraint on satisfaction, subject load pass rates and completions.
None of the framework’s 42 measures captures the availability, quality, reach or effect of career development support.
The paper argues that this is what an input framing looks like: career guidance understood as something that happens before a person reaches the training system and stops at the door. Three consequences follow. It cannot be tracked, so no movement in the targets can be attributed to it. It cannot attract investment through an outcomes-based agreement, because outcomes agreements fund what they measure. And it has no place in stewardship, so no one is answerable for whether it is present.
The paper also notes that since funding for the National Careers Institute was discontinued in March 2025, there is no national body with that mandate and no clear custodian for the Australian Blueprint for Career Development.
What the paper proposes
The NSA already has a category for capabilities that cut across the whole system. Gender equality and Closing the Gap are cross-cutting national priorities. Improving completions and foundation skills are cross-cutting policy initiatives. Each has a strategy, governance arrangements and, in most cases, measures. The paper argues that career development meets the same tests and sets out what embedding it would involve at four layers: learner-facing support at entry, progression and exit; career management skills in training products through qualification reform; practitioner standards recognised in funding and quality expectations; and a measure in the Outcomes Framework supported by data through the VET data streamlining work.
Several of these are inexpensive. A single Student Outcomes Survey question on whether a learner received career information or advice before enrolling would allow the relationship between guidance and the measures already collected to be tested rather than asserted.
The paper is deliberate about the limits of the case. The Australian evidence base linking career development services to VET completion and transition outcomes is thin, and there is no national estimate of what is currently spent on career guidance across Commonwealth, state and territory portfolios. Both gaps are part of what the paper asks governments to address.
Read the paper
CICA Career Development and the NSA Outcomes Framework
