These jobs offer solid starting salaries and secure work – but young Aussies keep turning their backs on them.
Young Aussies looking for a secure career could be overlooking some of the jobs we need most, with starting salaries of up to $90,000 failing to fix shortages in essential services.
A graduate NSW teacher starts on $90,177, a probationary police constable earns about $88,169 and a first-year registered nurse earns about $81,468 in base pay.
Yet schools, hospitals and police commands have all long struggled to attract and retain enough workers, exposing a problem that higher salaries alone have not been able to solve.
Jobs and Skills Australia’s latest Occupation Shortage List found 29 per cent of occupations were in shortage in 2025.
That was an improvement from 33 per cent in 2024 and 36 per cent in 2023, but shortages remain concentrated in key areas including health and education.
The figures complicate the debate over which careers young Australians should be pursuing, as some of the jobs offering strong salaries and clear employment prospects are also the ones governments are having the most trouble staffing.
There are plenty of roles with decent starting salaries that nobody wants. Picture: iStock
Teaching
A NSW public school teacher currently starts on $90,177 straight out of university, rising to $129,536 for an experienced classroom teacher.
And there are signs higher pay has worked.
The NSW Teachers Federation said unfilled vacancies had fallen 71 per cent since the major salary reset in October 2023, while teaching degree enrolments increased 23 per cent in NSW in the following year.
Federation president Henry Rajendra said the teacher shortage had “eased considerably”.
“Since then the teacher shortage has eased considerably and there is now a very strong pipeline of graduate teachers joining the profession,” he said.
But Mr Rajendra said workload remained the “remaining piece of the puzzle”.
The Federation said NSW primary teachers still received about two hours of preparation time each week, a figure unchanged since the 1980s, while high school teachers had received no increase in preparation time since the 1950s.
“If the NSW Government makes moves to give teachers the prep time they need it will have taken another huge stride forward in rebuilding public education,” Mr Rajendra said.
Nursing
Nursing presents a tougher picture.
A first-year registered nurse or midwife in the NSW public health system now earns $1566.70 a week, equivalent to about $81,468 a year in base pay.
An eighth-year registered nurse earns about $114,379 before shift penalties, overtime and allowances.
But NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association president O’Bray Smith said there were still widespread vacancies across the state.
Ms Smith said NSW Health did not maintain statewide vacancy data, making the full scale of the shortage difficult to quantify.
She said she had visited 51 health facilities during the past 12 months and had not encountered one without staffing shortages.
“Some of those places could have up to 50 per cent vacancy rates in their staffing,” she said.
The pressure appears particularly acute in regional NSW.
Registered nurse Emma Ratajczyk, who has worked in the profession for almost 30 years and is president of a NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association branch, said the regional referral hospital where she worked had a nursing and midwifery vacancy rate of about 16 per cent.
The approximately 90-bed hospital regularly operated above capacity, she said, forcing existing nurses and midwives to take on overtime and increasing reliance on agency and rural relief staff.
“Nurses and midwives work a lot of overtime to maintain those safe staffing levels,” Ms Ratajczyk said.
“But it’s a really short-term solution because, of course, the fatigue that comes with working those extra shifts really disrupts that work-life balance and family life generally.”
A University of Sydney study of more than 2000 NSW public-sector nurses and midwives released by the union last month found 66 per cent often considered leaving their professions.
Another 82 per cent said they had too much work to do, 56 per cent regularly stayed after their shift ended and 54 per cent said they lacked adequate work-life balance.
Ms Smith said pay, workload, workplace violence and inflexible working arrangements were all contributing to retention problems.
Yet both women said they would still encourage young people to consider nursing.
“Most days, my answer is still, I would absolutely recommend it,” Ms Ratajczyk said.
“I love the contribution I make to my patients.”
Australia’s longer-term nursing challenge is substantial, with federal workforce modelling projecting a shortage of 70,707 full-time-equivalent nurses by 2035 if supply fails to keep pace with demand.
Policing
NSW Police has also turned to higher salaries and paid training to rebuild its workforce.
A probationary constable currently earns about $88,169, including loading, while the published salary reaches $99,811 at Constable Level 5.
Student police officers are also paid $1360 a week during the 16-week residential component of their academy training.
Police Association of NSW president Kevin Morton said staffing challenges across the state were “well documented”, but frontline numbers were improving.
In May, 349 probationary constables graduated from the Goulburn Police Academy, the largest class in more than 13 years.
That followed another major intake last August, when 314 recruits were sworn in.
The union has long advocated for recruits to be paid while training and negotiated the 2024 police award, which provides a 19 per cent base pay increase for non-commissioned officers across four years.
But Mr Morton said reducing workload remained a major focus.
The association has pushed for some non-core duties, including changes to mental health call-outs and prisoner management and transport, to be handled differently so officers can focus more heavily on frontline policing.
“Despite ongoing challenges, the men and women currently serving in the NSWPF continue to respond to an overwhelming number of incidents with professionalism and commitment to their communities,” Mr Morton said.
The experience across the three professions suggests money matters, but does not solve everything.
Higher teacher salaries have coincided with falling vacancies and a stronger graduate pipeline. Police recruitment has surged after paid academy training and significant wage increases.
Nursing, meanwhile, shows what happens when recruitment is only one part of the problem, with overtime, workloads, shift work and retention continuing to place pressure on the system.
For young Australians deciding what career is worth the training, the message is clear: some jobs offering strong starting salaries and safe employment prospects are also the jobs the country still cannot get enough people to do.
The bigger challenge is keeping them there.
