September 2, 2025
In the year to February 2025, 268,000 Australians were retrenched, 12% of everyone who left or lost a job, at an annual retrenchment rate of 1.9%, up 0.2 percentage points on the year before (source: ABS, Job mobility, February 2025). Those workers are competing for a shrinking pool of roles: there were 329,500 job vacancies in May 2026, down 30.3% from the May 2022 peak (source: ABS, Job Vacancies, Australia, May 2026). Where a redundancy affects 15 or more staff, the employer must give Services Australia written notice before dismissals take effect (source: Fair Work Ombudsman, Redundancy), so providers often know a cohort is coming. What they cannot rely on is a steady supply of genuine, still-open vacancies to move that cohort into.
Retrenchment runs at scale in Australia: 268,000 people were retrenched in the year to February 2025, at an annual rate of 1.9% (source: ABS, Job mobility, February 2025). Outplacement itself is employer-funded by market practice, with no statutory footing, so no official body sizes the industry. The measures that matter are the re-employment market those workers walk into and the outcomes a provider can prove. In May 2026 there were 329,500 job vacancies, down 2.1% on February 2026 and down 30.3% from the 2022 peak, while the unemployment rate sat at 4.4% (source: ABS, Labour Force, Australia, May 2026). For a provider, the constraint is rarely demand, it is access to genuine, still-open vacancies to place people into.
Spacewalk gives each engagement a private, branded job board, so your consultants spend their time coaching rather than trawling job boards.
Build your branded Spacewalk job board and invite your talent community in minutes
Whether you choose to stream roles automatically, invite employers or post them yourself they are automatically matched to your talent pool
Track applications, placements and community engagement from one reporting dashboard
Unlike generic job boards, Spacewalk gives you a branded, private or public jobs marketplace your talent actually trust, with sourcing, matching and reporting running automatically in the background.
Outplacement providers do not get the benefit of the Privacy Act employee records exemption. OAIC guidance states the exemption is unlikely to apply to organisations providing recruitment or human resource management services under contract to an employer, and it does not cover prospective employees or unsuccessful applicants, so candidate data must be handled under the Australian Privacy Principles in full (source: OAIC, employee records exemption).
The pressure is real: there were 1,205 notifiable data breach notifications in 2025, an all-time high and up 8% on 2024 (source: OAIC, media release, 6 July 2026). Candidate data should only ever be matched to genuine, employer-direct vacancies rather than passed to third-party aggregators. This is context, not legal advice.
This is an illustrative scenario, not a customer story. An Australian outplacement provider supporting 200 people through a manufacturing retrenchment stands up a branded job board when consultation begins. Instead of emailing job links, consultants watch an employer-direct feed match each person to live, relevant roles, and see application and interview activity per cohort. When the outgoing employer asks for evidence, the provider exports landings by cohort rather than assembling screenshots at the end.
With participant-level data. Spacewalk tracks registrations, board usage, applications, interviews and landings per cohort, so you can show the outgoing employer what happened to their people rather than a summary of coaching hours.
There is no official Australian benchmark. The ABS publishes national retrenchment figures, but not a programme-level re-employment rate, so any credible claim has to rest on your own current cohort data.
Yes. Each engagement gets its own branded board, so the experience carries the outgoing employer's or your own brand rather than a generic job site.
From an employer-direct stream of verified, active roles with direct apply links, matched to each participant's skills, seniority and location. Your team can also post roles or invite employers to post, but the vacancies are not scraped from job boards or aggregators.
No. Work eligibility verification stays with the hiring employer. Spacewalk connects people to live vacancies and tracks their progress.
The Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles. Providers sit outside the employee records exemption, so candidate CVs, assessments and placement records are APP-regulated, which means privacy notices, data minimisation and defined retention.
Spacewalk supports outplacement and career transition providers worldwide, including outplacement job board software in the United Kingdom, outplacement software for US providers and career transition platforms for Canadian firms.
Explore Spacewalk for Australian professional associations, alumni career platforms for Australian institutions, Australian adult education providers and Australian skills bootcamps.
