From Defining to Communicating and Counting Design. A big win for the Design Sector!

Today the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released the updated OSCA (Occupation Standard Classification for Australia, formerly “ANZSCO”- see note below) and for the first time “Design” has been recognised as a distinct profession covering a wide range of specialisations. Its Minor Group number is 242… remember it! This change signifies that design is not a niche occupation or a subcategory of other professions, it is a significant and growing field of core skills with many different applications.

Key changes include:

• OSCA includes a new grouping ‘Design, Engineering and Science Professionals’, with four subcategories. Significantly, design is its own subcategory, which means we’re now recognised as having 50,000-150,000 people working in this sector. Considering OSCA has only 25 professional minor groups in total it is a strong validation of design being a major contributor to Australia’s social, environmental and economic activities.

• Interior design has been restored to a skill level 1 occupation, in fact, all occupations listed within the Design group are recognised as Skill Level 1. This skill level is used for jobs that demand a level of skill equal to a Bachelor Degree or higher qualification, or at least five years of relevant experience. The greater the range and complexity of the set of tasks, the greater the skill level of an occupation. Achieving this change was an essential element of our campaign for recognition of the professionalism of interior designers.

• A new unit group of "digital designers" has been created - which brings UX/UI designers over from IT professionals and into Design. This change recognises the distinct skills of designers working in these roles by grouping them with other creatives in the digital design classification.

• Updated Skills Lists. The skills lists for various design professions have been updated to reflect contemporary work practices. These updates ensure that the OSCA classifications remain relevant and that they accurately represent the skills and expertise required in today’s design landscape. You can find full details of all the skill descriptions here.

• A few occupations which used to be listed within design sub-categories have been moved elsewhere. Of note: Costume Designer no longer is listed within the fashion subcategory - it has been moved to "arts professionals".

• Some occupations are no longer listed. These include Ceramic Designer, Glass Designer, Digital Media Designer, Technical Illustrator, Publication Designer, Environmental Designer, Usability Architect, Interactive Media Designer, Leisurewear Designer.

The new occupation titles in OSCA include the following:

What this all means for Designers

Expanding the list of design occupations means that the value and contribution of the sector is better understood, and the opportunities being created by design are being recognised. Grouping all the design occupations together underscores that regardless of the specialisation – product, space, experience – this profession shares common skills and approaches.

For designers, educators, recruiters, and organisation, this change is more than just a bureaucratic process—it’s a chance to refine how our work is understood and valued by the broader community. Opportunities arising from the publication of OSCA today include:

1. Communicate Unique Value of Design Disciplines

The introduction of new categories and the reclassification of existing ones helps clarify what we do as designers in Australia. In addition, the referencing of specific skill sets within each classification makes it easier to communicate our unique skills and the value we bring to Australia’s social, environmental and economic activities. We encourage all DIA members to familiarise themselves with the occupation descriptions and skill definitions, and utilise this language to describe the value and define the quality of our offerings in future communications with stakeholders.

Throughout 2025 DIA will be running a series of collaboration sessions to identify where and how OSCA descriptions and skill definitions accurately reflect sectoral understandings - and build a compendium of required changes and/or additional information to include in future revisions of OSCA (see note below about continual monitoring by the ABS).

2. Shape Educational Pathways

OSCA classifications impact the development of educational programs at secondary and tertiary levels. Educational institutions now have an opportunity to align their curricula with real-world job requirements and emerging trends as reflected in the classifications.

DIA will be strongly positioned throughout 2025 to engage with educational institutions to identify where and how course offerings can be enhanced to ensure graduates of the future can actively contribute the required skills to our sector.

3. Enhance National and Organisational Workforce Strategies

At a national level, the new classification structure will guide government workforce strategies, including migration policies and job creation initiatives. The classifications also enable individual organisations to describe and benchmark their design skills and capabilities and distinguish the quality of their work in the marketplace.  Further to this, the classifications also provide recruiters and HR experts the opportunity to baseline role competency requirements and standardise recruitment strategies and campaigns.

DIA will be engaging with designers throughout 2025 to advocate for recognition of their skills and capabilities within organisations, by recruiters and for government agencies. It is proposed that a series of events will be held throughout the year to regularly gather and share knowledge and examples of design role competencies and sectoral workforce strategies. It is our ambition that by 2026 a draft set of benchmark descriptions of design occupation skills will be developed, for community engagement and review in 2026.

4. Benchmark Professional Skills and Competencies

Updated classifications help enhance the professional recognition of design roles in Australia. The latest version of OSCA provides an opportunity for designers to consider and develop robust career development plans based on nationally recognised skills and competencies. From today, it is also possible to benchmark individual skills as per the definitions provided in OSCA.

Our ambition is for a future framework to identify levels of competency for each design occupation ranging from graduate to expert roles. From 2025 onwards, DIA will be engaging with designers and design organisations to gather information about how to differentiate levels of competency within occupations. Through this process, we will also capture role titles and occupation specialisation and alternative occupation titles, to build a corpus of definitions which can be referred to in future.
 

What is left to do?

The changes reflected in OSCA represent both progress and a challenge for the Australian design sector. While we celebrate the recognition of design as a standalone profession and the inclusion of Digital, UX, and uplift of Interior Design, we must also address the critical omission of Strategic and Service Design and related professions.

In good news, the ABS have announced that they will now be undertaking regular reviews of OSCA, from 2025 the updates will transition into an annual, ongoing maintenance model.  While occupational groupings will only be updated every five years (timed to align with the Census), new or changed occupations themselves (ie Service and Strategic Design) can and will be updated on an annual basis.

To be recognised as design occupations the ABS will require:

• Evidence of 300-10,000 people employed in these roles (or 50 to be listed as a “specialisation”).

• Definitive descriptions of the skills utilised in these roles

External ANZSCO users will be able to contribute to the review process by providing submissions during biannual consultation rounds.

It is proposed that in 2025 DIA will be running a campaign to bring practitioners in service, strategic and other emergent design practices together to describe and define the occupations, skills and competencies of these roles. DIA will utilise the information provided by practitioners in the 2024 survey, and build upon this content with the inputs of communities of practice. Documenting this information will position the sector to strongly advocate for inclusion of these occupations in OSCA either prior to, or following, the 2026 Census.

Further to this, it is proposed that in 2026 DIA will run a campaign to encourage all designers to accurately describe their occupation in the Census, so that our numbers can and will be counted. This campaign would promote the existing occupation titles, and proposed emergent titles (such as service and strategic design), for practitioners to utilise in their census forms.

If you would like to be part of the Community of Practice for emergent design occupations, please sign up to receive notifications from the DIA here…
 

What is OSCA?

OSCA has been launched today by ABS, and represents a significant change in the way government agencies (and by extension educational institutions and industry organisations) will recognise job roles and skill requirements of Australian workers.

Formerly known as the Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations (ANZSCO), OSCA is a skill-based classification used to categorise all occupations in the Australian labour market. The standard government categories are used in everything from the Census, analysis of the labour market, university course planning through to immigration policy.

From now, the classifications have been distinguished for Australia and separated from New Zealand’s to “allow each agency to maintain separate but aligned classifications, with localised adaptations to better reflect the contemporary labour market and meet stakeholder needs.”

You can find more details about the change from ANZSCO to OSCA here https://www.abs.gov.au/about/consultation-and-conferences/updating-anzsco/about-osca

Thank you

DIA would like to thank the hundreds of practitioners who were involved in Town Hall sessions, online forums and contributed to the survey throughout 2023 and 2024. We could not have achieved these results without your help!

Special thanks to members of the ANZSCO Working Group Dr Laura Kostanski (chair), Simon Goodrich and David Robertson for your hard work and collaboration with members of the design sector to develop the two DIA submissions to the ABS.

Additional thanks to Dr AJ Lanyon from the ABS, DIA Senior Policy Advisor Denise Ryan and the DIA Continuing Custodians Advisor Nicole Monks, who contributed their time and knowledge to the Define Design Forum event in 2023.

Further information about the working group activities and the DIA’s submissions to the ABS can be found at:

https://www.design.org.au/define-design?rq=define%20design

https://www.design.org.au/dianews/define-design-occupation-codes-review?rq=define%20design