The cotton sector has prioritised workforce development for strategic investment by setting human capacity building as a goal and defining a strategy to plan for future industry capacity needs. This strategy reflects an understanding that effective workforce development is important for a sectors competitiveness and innovation. However workforce development is not straightforward, particularly for primary industries, where there are a relatively large number of individual businesses that on their own cannot influence the organisation and activities of training organisations or employment services providers, or even necessarily offer a broad range of career opportunities within their own businesses. Therefore to ensure there are enough people of appropriate capacity to meet the demands and needs of the Australian cotton sector in the medium term, collective action by the organisations that influence or have a stake in human capacity is required. To take effective action however required:

a. an understanding of the current system of how people are attracted, retained and developed in the sector and what is currently working and why,

b. a framework to assess, prioritize, align, plan, invest and act to improve how workforce development happens over time.

c. confidence to act strategically and collaboratively in this domain.

This includes both what individual businesses can do to develop their workforce – but also what collective industry action can do.

Research in workforce development has identified that to improve the contribution of human capacity to a sectors’ competitiveness a multi-dimensional response is required. This means that people need to be simultaneously deployed more effectively in the production system, developed to meet new challenges and provided with interesting work and career opportunities. Further, this is understood to only be achieved with due consideration to the particularities of local communities and regional economies in designing effective support systems. The issues of attracting, retaining and developing people in a sector then is far from solved simply by generating knowledge about skill needs, clever marketing strategies to attract people or developing and delivering training products. What is required is effective workforce development across the supply chain requiring both an understanding of the workforce development system and a capacity to improve it.

This project activated the cotton sector strategy and addressed these challenges by establishing a research-based process to:

a) collect and interpret regionally specific data and information about how cotton workforce development happens and what is currently working well or could be improved. This includes building an information system on the diversity of job and skill profiles of farm and off farm businesses through the supply chain in a rapidly changing production environment, the way people are attracted, retained and developed in the sector; the demand for people and skills, regional labour market analysis, and the different roles and contributions of stakeholders like employers, training organisations, employment organisations and government in the cotton workforce system;

b) engage key stakeholders, including those outside the sector, in understanding the workforce development system to identify potential partnerships for local action;

c) develop a regionally relevant framework to mobilise and support networks of employers and relevant stakeholders in 2-3 regions in planning to improve workforce development.

Overall, the CRDC Innovative Work project has increased the confidence of cotton stakeholders to act to improve cotton workforce development. This project has also advanced knowledge on the nature of workforce challenges in agriculture, particularly associated with new technologies, post-drought recovery and the experience of work by employees and human resource practices of employers.