Why people leave: leadership & lack of growth

Our ground-level view across all four markets this month.

1. The Australian Bureau of Statistics now counts more than 330,000 unfilled jobs nationally

The shortage spans healthcare, construction, education and technology. It’s the headline reason the government has kept its skilled migration program active while overhauling how the system works this financial year.

2. The government is investing $85.2 million to speed up skills recognition for overseas-trained workers

The funding is aimed at streamlining skills assessments and occupational licensing, cutting the time it takes a qualified overseas hire to start work.

3. The Specialist Skills stream of the new visa can issue a four-year visa in as little as seven days

That applies to applicants earning above the Specialist Skills Income Threshold, currently around $146,700, a bracket most senior engineering, product and marketing leadership hires clear comfortably.

4. Australia’s tech workforce is nearing one million people

The Tech Council of Australia’s Tech Jobs Report 2026 puts the national tech workforce at roughly 977,000 as of November 2025, with regional tech jobs growing faster than metro roles and early-career hiring holding up despite AI adoption.

5. Design teams are adopting AI faster than almost anyone else in tech

The AI in Design 2026 report from Designer Fund and Foundation Capital, based on more than 900 designers across 60-plus countries, found weekly AI use jumped from 54 per cent last year to 91 per cent this year. Half of respondents have already pushed AI-generated code to production. It’s the exact tension this Thursday’s round table is built around: designers can now do more, and most organisations haven’t settled what they should be accountable for as a result.

6. Labour’s share of marketing budgets rose from 21.9 per cent to 24.5 per cent this year

Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey found this counterintuitive result even as CMOs push more spend toward AI-optimised channels. AI didn’t shrink the labour line. It raised the price of the people who can direct it.

7. Forrester is forecasting 15 per cent of agency jobs will disappear in 2026, almost double last year’s rate

The roles most exposed are clerical, sales and research support. Senior creative and strategy roles are the most protected, which lines up with what we’re seeing in marketing briefs.

8. Every product team surveyed in Productboard’s 2026 AI report is now using AI, saving an average of four hours per task

Ninety-four per cent use it daily or often. The efficiency gain is real, and it’s concentrated in drafting, documentation and research synthesis rather than the decisions that define a senior PM’s value.

9. 98 per cent of product teams have changed, or plan to change, their team structure because of AI

Separate research from Atlassian found prioritisation, planning and advanced analytics remain largely human work even as AI clears the admin. That gap is exactly where the strongest product briefs are being rewritten this quarter.

10. Our own placements this month point to the same underlying pattern across Marketing, Product and Engineering

AI is absorbing execution work. It isn’t making the judgement calls. At the same time, teams are getting leaner, and individual contributors are taking on broader ownership across the full lifecycle rather than handing off between specialists. Between them, those two shifts are changing what “senior” means in a brief.