The federal government has expanded the Core Skills Occupation List, adding dozens of roles in healthcare, cybersecurity, and construction in response to acute labour shortages that employers warn are constraining economic growth.
The latest update to Australia's skills assessment framework adds 43 new occupations to the Core Skills Occupation List (CSOL), which determines which workers are eligible to apply for employer-sponsored temporary visas under the Skills in Demand (subclass 482) program. The additions include registered nurses, aged care workers, software engineers, civil engineers, and electricians.
The expansion follows sustained lobbying from industry groups across healthcare, construction, and technology sectors, who argue that domestic training pipelines cannot produce enough qualified workers to meet current demand — let alone the accelerating requirements driven by infrastructure spending, an ageing population, and digital transformation programs across government and the private sector.
"We have hospitals that cannot fully open wards because they do not have the nursing staff. This is not a future problem — it is happening right now."
— Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association
The Skills in Demand visa, introduced in late 2023 to replace the Temporary Skill Shortage (TSS) visa, operates on a tiered salary framework designed to prioritise highly skilled workers while maintaining protections for lower-paid roles. Employers sponsoring workers in newly added occupations must demonstrate that they have genuinely attempted to recruit locally before turning to overseas talent.
Immigration advocates have welcomed the CSOL expansion but caution that processing delays within the Department of Home Affairs remain a significant barrier. Average processing times for 482 primary applications currently sit at over four months, a timeline that many employers say renders the visa impractical for urgent hiring needs in fast-moving sectors like cybersecurity and emergency healthcare.
