Comments about the past 12 months of Australian Manufacturing

Author Stephen Noble

I’ve always felt that our company has been a reasonable bellwether of the health of manufacturing – I run a recruitment company called Australia Wide Personnel which has been a substantial supplier of both professional technical and blue collar labour hire staff to the manufacturing sector both Melbourne & Sydney, since 1979. If manufacturers have confidence and orders, they’re usually recruiting staff.

As we move close to Christmas, these are my observations about manufacturing over the past 12 months:

• We have had the strongest demand for recruitment from manufacturers since the GFC.
• All is not all lost with automotive – specialised automotive manufacturers, recreational vehicles and aftermarket suppliers have had strong requirements for staff.
• We have been involved with staffing of a number of greenfield / brownfield sites over the past year and it’s been a long time since we’ve seen this type of investment being poured back into manufacturing.
• We have seen a number of clients “re-shoring” their manufacturing operations back to Australia, after earlier offshoring. The payoff is reduced lead times and better quality.
• The consistently low Australian dollar is assisting a range of our clients. Food & beverage and building materials related manufacturing is performing particularly well.

We are pretty confident that this strength in manufacturing will continue into 2017.

Have a Merry Christmas & Happy New Year.