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Canberra's Bricklayer Shortage: A Real Opening for Qualified Tradies from Overseas

News · 2026-08-24 · 4 min read

Construction cranes keep rising over Canberra, but the number of people learning to lay bricks there is falling fast. Across the whole ACT region, just seven people are currently in training to become bricklayers. Over the same period, the construction workforce expanded by 10 per cent while apprentice numbers dropped by 20 per cent. The result is a trade kept going by a small group of experienced tradespeople, many of them well beyond the age when most of their peers start thinking about retirement.

Local industry groups see this as a crisis. If you are a skilled tradesperson thinking about where to grow your career abroad, it looks more like an opportunity: steady, genuine demand and surprisingly few barriers to getting started.

No Licence Needed to Lay Bricks in the ACT

This part surprises many people. Bricklaying in the ACT is not a licensed occupation, so anyone can legally lay bricks on a residential or commercial site without showing proof of a qualification. Lynne Sheffield, founder of Quality Training in Construction and a 30-year veteran of the industry, sees the effects on the sites she visits: uneven work from people who never had proper training.

For the industry, that is a quality problem. For a migrant who does hold formal qualifications and real site experience, it means arriving in a market where properly trained bricklayers are hard to find and highly appreciated. Daniel Swan, who has run his own bricklaying business in Canberra for over two decades, has plenty of work. What he lacks is enough reliable people on the trowel.

Three Reasons the Gap Will Not Close Quickly

This is not just a passing dip in the building cycle. Several long-term pressures are piling up at once:

1. Training depends on house building. Most bricklaying apprentices learn on residential jobs, and residential activity in the ACT is soft right now, even though commercial and infrastructure work, including the territory's light rail expansion, keeps labour demand high. With fewer house jobs, fewer employers are ready to take on a four-year apprenticeship.
2. Many apprentices do not finish. Geordan Murray of the Housing Industry Association notes that far more apprentices begin than complete. The trade is physically hard, and apprentices often spend too much time on labouring instead of building their trowel skills, so many leave before they become truly useful on site.
3. Experienced workers are getting older. On sites like Daniel Swan's, it is normal for tradespeople to be over 40. Without new arrivals, whether trained apprentices or skilled migrants, that experience retires and nobody replaces it.

Then layer the ACT government's commitment to build 30,000 new homes by 2030 on top of all this. A housing target that big cannot be met with only seven apprentices coming through.

Is Canberra the Right Move for You?

For qualified bricklayers and other construction trades looking at Australia, Canberra is a good example of how to read a job market. Here is what to look for:

• Demand that lasts, backed by government infrastructure commitments and long-range housing targets rather than one single project.
• A skills gap employers openly admit to, which often leads to quicker hiring, greater willingness to sponsor and less competition for placements.
• Low regulatory barriers to entry, which can shorten the time between arriving and earning. Because the local system will not check qualifications for you, be ready to show your training and experience clearly yourself.

Bricklaying is still tough physical work, and Canberra's own apprentices will say so. But if you already have the training and the stamina, an undersupplied market like this is where a skilled migration pathway tends to reward you fastest.

Final Thoughts for Skilled Tradies

Canberra's building boom has revealed a trade that local training simply cannot keep up with. That is a serious issue for the ACT construction industry, and a real opening for skilled tradespeople considering Australia. If you have built your bricklaying experience in the Middle East or back home in the Philippines, keep your certificates, references and work records organised and ready to show. Markets this short of workers are rare, and they do not tend to stay that way for long.

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