RMIT Online CEO Nic Cola on why the market has quietly shifted the definition of a skills match under their feet.
More than one million Australians are currently out of work. For a significant portion of them, the barrier to re-employment is not a lack of experience or expertise. According to ABS data on barriers and incentives to labour force participation, one in three unemployed Australians say the key hurdle is simply finding a role that aligns with what they already know how to do.
Nic Cola, CEO of RMIT Online, argues that framing misses what is actually happening. “They’re trying to do that in a market that has quietly shifted under their feet,” he said. “The baseline definition of a skills match has fundamentally shifted.”
The shift Cola is describing is the expectation that traditional and domain expertise now requires an additional layer of digital capability to meet modern hiring standards. With nearly 90% of all Australian jobs anticipating medium to high augmentation from AI, according to Jobs and Skills Australia’s Generative AI Capacity Study, the question employers are increasingly asking is not just whether a candidate knows their field but whether they can apply that knowledge alongside the tools now embedded in how that field operates.
What the numbers show
The RMIT Online and Deloitte Access Economics research, published earlier this year, found that 54% of the Australian workforce currently sits at a beginner level of AI literacy. Workers are twice as likely to be advanced in basic technical AI tasks, such as writing prompts, than in the critical judgement skills employers increasingly look for, including ethical awareness, risk assessment and the ability to evaluate AI outputs.
That gap has a direct financial consequence for workers who close it. Cola cited the wage data from the same research. “Shifting from a beginner to an intermediate level of AI literacy comes with an additional wage benefit of around $7,000 annually for a full-time worker,” he said. “For those who build that capability to an advanced level, that premium rises to nearly $11,000.”
For job seekers, those figures make the case for upskilling in concrete terms. For employers, they reflect the same gap from the other side: the candidates who have built that additional capability are fewer, more competitive and increasingly able to command a premium.
What it means for small businesses
The practical implication for small business owners runs in two directions simultaneously.
As employers, the shift in the definition of a skills match means that a candidate pool which looks qualified on paper may be missing a layer of capability that is now considered baseline in many roles. That does not necessarily mean rejecting experienced candidates, but it does mean being more deliberate about what onboarding and development looks like for new hires who have strong domain expertise but limited digital fluency.
As operators managing existing teams, many small business owners are running the same risk internally. Staff who have been in their roles for years may have deep expertise in their function but sit at the beginner level of AI literacy that the research identifies as the majority position across the Australian workforce.
Cola’s argument is not that job seekers or employees need to start their education from scratch. “We don’t need them to start their education from scratch,” he said. “Instead, we need to normalise continuous learning as a track that runs parallel to a career. A flexible, targeted model where professionals can pick up specific, high-demand digital credentials ensures their hard-earned experience remains modern, competitive, and highly valued by employers.”
For small business owners, that framing translates into a practical question: are the people in your business, including yourself, keeping pace with the shifting baseline? The data suggests most are not yet. And the gap between those who are and those who are not is becoming measurable in both hiring outcomes and wages.
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