This indicator asks residents whether it is difficult to get enough workers with the right skills to fill local jobs. It was identified as an indicator of community wellbeing through consultation with Victorian regional communities, who identified that a key challenge affecting wellbeing was difficulty getting workers to fill local job vacancies, sometimes resulting in vacancies lasting months, or even years. Some of these vacancies can be in critical jobs that support wellbeing across the community, such as health, education and social services, to name a few.

Living in a community that provides meaningful job and income earning opportunities supports wellbeing of residents. However, when it is hard to fill vacant jobs, this is an indicator of potential problems for wellbeing. These wellbeing challenges can occur in many ways: first, if it is difficult to recruit skilled labour, this may indicate local liveability challenges are reducing willingness of people to shift to the community, or that local people are leaving rather than taking up local job opportunities. Second, unfilled jobs can lead to stress on those working locally, who may experience high workloads. Finally, unfilled local jobs can result in inability to deliver local goods and services. For example, a community unable to recruit a new general practitioner may not be able to provide enough medical appointment to meet the health needs of the local community.

Advantages: This indicator examines a common challenge experienced by rural communities: having jobs available but few people to fill them. It helps identify what may be causing challenges for wellbeing in other areas examined in a wellbeing framework, for example why there is poor access to services.

Disadvantages: Job vacancies can be highly skill specific, and not all job vacancies will lead to wellbeing challenges for communities. It can be helpful to identify what types of jobs are not being easily filled, to better understand the implications for wellbeing of the local community and its residents.

This indicator is measured by including questions about local workforce availability in a survey. Other indicators also provide relevant insight complementary to this indicator, in particular Job vacancies/advertisements and Local job opportunities. Few of Australia’s large scale surveys collect data about local workforce availability. In response to requests from Victorian rural communities, from 2025 a question about local workforce availability has been included in the University of Canberra Regional Wellbeing Survey. These data are publicly available in two forms: data tables that are updated annually, and the Regional Wellbeing Dashboard. These provide data for many, but not all, local government areas (LGAs) across Australia; where sample sizes are too small to show data for a specific LGA, data are made available for the larger region the LGA is a part of.