SUPPLEMENTARY REPORT - VET student outcomes 2020: impact of COVID-19 on

The proportion of vocational education and training (VET) students who completed a qualification in 2019 and were employed at the end of May 2020 was 71.6%, this represented a decrease of 5.0 percentage points from the corresponding period in the previous year. [...] The decline in the proportion of qualification completers employed after training from 2019 to 2020 did not translate into a similar increase in the proportion of unemployed, this is due to an increase in the proportion who were not participating in the labour force which was larger for females (4.6 percentage points) than for males (3.4 percentage points). [...] Despite the introduction of the federal government’s JobKeeper payment scheme, there were a proportion of VET students who completed a qualification during 2019, and who had a job after finishing their training, which they lost by the end of May 2020 due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. [...] Qualification completers from the broad fields of education of Food, Hospitality and Personal Services; and Creative Arts, had the highest proportions of those employed at the end of May 2020 who were temporarily stood down due to COVID-19 at 16.0% and 14.8% respectively. [...] While the findings of this report paint a fairly bleak picture in terms of employment outcomes for the VET qualification completers of 2019 compared with previous years, the information presented is for a snapshot in time at the end of May 2020, when national restrictions imposed to control the initial wave of COVID-19 infections were only just beginning to be eased.