Seven Apprentices for a Whole Territory: Canberra's Bricklayer Shortage and What It Means for South African Tradies

News · 2026-08-24 · 4 min read

Cranes keep going up over Canberra, but the people who lay the bricks are getting fewer. Just seven people are training as bricklayers anywhere in the ACT region right now. Over the same period, the construction workforce grew by 10 per cent while apprentice numbers fell by 20 per cent. The trade is being kept alive by a small group of tradespeople, many of them well past the age when their mates start thinking about retirement.

Local industry bodies call that a crisis. For a qualified bricklayer looking at jobs in Australia for South Africans, it looks more like a market with real, lasting demand and surprisingly few barriers.

Nobody Checks Your Papers

This is the part that should make any tradesperson stop scrolling. In the ACT, bricklaying is not a licensed occupation. Anybody can legally lay bricks on a commercial or residential site without ever showing a qualification. Lynne Sheffield, who has 30 years in the industry and founded Quality Training in Construction, sees the results on the sites she visits: uneven workmanship from people who were never trained properly.

Why That Helps the Properly Trained

The gap has two sides. For the industry, it is a genuine quality headache. For a migrant who does hold formal qualifications and real site experience, it means entering a market where well-trained bricklayers are noticeably scarce and noticeably valued. Employers such as Daniel Swan, who has run his own bricklaying business in Canberra for more than two decades, have plenty of work. What they lack is reliable people to put on the trowel.

Three Forces Keeping the Gap Open

You could write this off as a passing dip in the building cycle. It is not. Three structural pressures are piling up together:

Training depends on a slow sector. Most bricklaying apprentices learn on residential building jobs, and residential work in the ACT is soft at the moment, even though commercial and infrastructure projects, including the territory's light rail expansion, keep labour demand high. Fewer house jobs means fewer employers ready to sign up for a four-year apprenticeship.
Apprentices quit. Geordan Murray of the Housing Industry Association notes that many more apprentices start than finish. The physical strain of the work, plus too much time spent labouring instead of building trowel skills, means many leave before they are properly useful on site.
The workforce is getting older. On sites like Swan's, tradespeople over 40 are normal, not unusual. Without new people, whether trained apprentices or skilled migrants, that know-how retires and is not replaced.

Now layer the ACT government's promise of 30,000 new homes by 2030 and the sums do not work. A housing target that big cannot be met with seven apprentices coming through.

Signs of a Market Worth Moving For

For qualified bricklayers and other building trades sizing up Australia, Canberra is a handy lesson in reading demand. The signs to look for are:

Demand that is structural and lasting rather than a short spike, driven by government infrastructure commitments and long-range housing targets instead of one project.
A skills gap employers admit openly, which usually means faster hiring, more willingness to sponsor and less competition for positions.
Few regulatory hurdles to start working, which can shorten the time between landing and earning. The flip side is that you must be ready to prove your qualifications and experience clearly, because the local system will not do that sorting for you.

Bricklaying is still hard physical work, and Canberra's own apprentices will say so. But for someone who already has the training and the stamina, a market this short of workers is where a skilled migration pathway tends to pay off quickest.

Before You Pack the Trowel

If you hold a South African trade certificate in bricklaying, often called a red seal, keep certified copies ready and expect your trade to be assessed again for Australia, often through Trades Recognition Australia. Gather references and photos of past work too. In a market with no licence check, that proof is what sets you apart.

The Short Version

Canberra's building boom has shown up a trade that local training cannot keep pace with. That is a real problem for the ACT construction industry and a real opening for skilled tradespeople considering Australia. Markets do not end up this short of workers by accident, and they seldom stay that way for long.

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