From the APSCo Chair: Stephen Smith

Ask lots of questions and listen very carefully

When I last wrote a piece for Recruitment & Co, we had just delivered a very successful Conference here at APSCo.

Business across most sectors seemed to be in a boom phase and large parts of the markets had moved back to some form of office work. The focuses were on talent shortage; lockdowns in many states very much felt a thing of the past.

Today for a lot of us, this current lockdown is nearly three months old and we look forward to the school holidays for different reasons than normal (for the break from homeschooling rather than the opportunity to go away with family), but I still can't help feeling how lucky a lot of us have been. For large parts of the national markets, the recruitment economy has kept going strong and a V-shaped bounce for a lot of those areas that haven't seems hopeful to arise leading into Christmas.

Our schools in the main, certainly from my experience, have been outstanding in facilitating homeschooling and we look forward to the unlocking, only a few weeks away as a time when business activity should ramp up quickly again. This optimism I feel is only strengthened with talk of regional travel in October (my kids can't wait to see their grandparents) state travel hopefully by Christmas and even international travel just around the corner. It would be remiss of me to not note and send out my thoughts to those that have not been so lucky, but hopefully, the environment post lockdown provides the opportunity for all to rebuild and regrow their businesses.

There is no doubt that the world will be different moving forward, especially the world of work, but I am excited about what the end of 2021 looks like and particularly Christmas with family. 2022 could be one of the strongest employment markets we have ever seen.

The conversation now moves to how we work together moving forward. Questions about the return to the office, about vaccination programs, and vaccination passports are likely to be at the forefront of every aspect of life from going to the office, to the cafe or restaurant or Cinema. It’s likely to be challenging and raise a lot of questions. My thoughts around this, we need to be asking lots of questions and listening very carefully to people’s concerns and fears.

Good luck with the last quarter of 2021, I hope it's a good one.