According to a study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Australia's focus on skilled migration means a rapid improvement in the education of its workforce, with immigrants and new entrants well above retirees.
Deepa Kumundu (right) and her supervisor are two of the five skilled immigrants who have experienced engineers at Darebin Council
By 2015, the number of workers with higher education degrees had risen about 37 percent, down from 40 percent in Europe but well above 21 percent in the United States.
Australia's higher-education workforce has grown by more than three times the 11% workforce.
OECD analysis suggests that while immigration has only a temporary impact on the age structure of the workforce, it can improve overall levels of education.
The education of Australian immigrants is polarizing, with refugees and reunited migrants less educated than the resident population, while migrants seeking employment have a higher degree of education.
The OECD lists Australia as the only country with a higher average education level than local new entrants to the labour market: 62 percent of new immigrants have higher education, compared with 55 percent of young new workers. In the decade to 2015, recent immigration accounted for 40 percent of Australia's higher education workforce growth, compared with 23 percent in the United States and 16 percent in Europe.
In addition to new workers and immigrants, the labour market is also affected by retirement trends and employment participation by older workers. Over the same period, the retiring baby boomers have lost 14% of the Australian workforce, while declining employment among older workers has reduced their share of the workforce by 4%.
The decline was offset by a 20% increase in new entrants and 9.5% growth in immigrant labor.
OECD research also shows that the retirement rate in Australia is the most significant among those with low levels of education. As immigrants and new workers have a high level of education, the overall level of education of the labour force continues to improve.
By 2015, the OECD estimated that the number of people with low levels of education in Australia was down nearly 60 percent, mainly because nearly 1 million of the less educated retired.
Australia has also benefited from the growth of the highly educated adult workforce, which contributed 16 percentage points to the growth of the higher education workforce.