Casualisation and outsourcing: Trends and implications for work-related training

Given that the use of both casual employment and outsourced labour have been increasing in recent years, important questions arise concerning access to, and participation in, structured training. Very little attention has been paid to such questions in the existing literature.

This study seeks to fill this gap, at least partly, by first, describing current and past levels of casualisation and outsourcing within the Australian workforce, and second, making use of existing data sets to identify how casualisation and outsourcing are related to training. To fulfil these aims, extensive use is made of a number of different data sources, including the two rounds of the Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey (AWIRS) and various Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) surveys of training and education experience.

It should be noted, however, that while analysing these data sets advances our knowledge of the relationship between training and employment arrangements, the data sets were not designed to address this issue and thus are not ideal for our purposes. For this reason, even after examining the existing data, many questions remain unanswered.

Casual employees are much less likely than permanent employees to participate in formal training activities, and this difference is not merely due to differences in factors such as hours worked, type of job held or workplace characteristics. However, this does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that casuals are at a disadvantage in the training process, and that they are falling behind permanent workers in terms of accessing skills. Rather, a number of the results point to a 'substitution' effect, in which low levels of participation in employer-supported training by casuals are offset (in part at least) by relatively high levels of participation in external training that was completed in the worker's own time.

The question that could not be answered with the available data, however, is whether the substitution of training types was by choice or because of the lack of the option of firm-provided training. Nonetheless, results from multi-variate analyses do lead to the conclusion that motivational factors of both the employees themselves and employers towards participating in, and offering, training are the key to gaining a better understanding of why casual workers are less likely to participate in employer-provided training.