With significant numbers of baby boomers expected to retire in the next five years, the Canberra Business Council is warning about a peak in the shortage of skilled workers in the city.

“We’re going to see a lot of people exiting the workforce at that point and not enough to replace them,” warned Chris Faulks, chief executive of the Canberra Business Council.

According to Faulks, the situation is so serious that, if federal government departments cannot attract staff, they may have to leave Canberra. “There are already signs of that in the public sector where some of the IT areas have gone to South Australia and you’re looking at other departments that are moving sections of their work out of the ACT [Australian Capital Territory],” said the chief executive, as quoted by ABC News.

“We’ve got wonderful institutions here to train our workforce, but we really struggle to keep population and to grow our population in the ACT,” Faulks added. The territory relies “almost entirely” on net migration, a lot of it coming from other regions of the country. “We need to be able to sell Canberra as a wonderful place to come and live and work.”