Forge Your Future (FYF) was designed to address a fundamental challenge facing Australia's defence industry: how do we help young people understand where they fit within future industries and create meaningful connections between emerging talent and workforce demand?
Delivered by Greenbeam, with support from Anyway (formerly Year13) enabled by the Australian Government's Defence Industry Schools Pathway Program, Forge Your Future became more than a career awareness initiative. It demonstrated how a capability-led approach can help identify, engage and develop future talent at scale.
By combining Greenbeam's workforce capability methodology, technology and project delivery expertise, the program created a repeatable model for early workforce discovery and talent mobility.
Forge Your Future has since been featured in the Australian Government's 2026 Defence Industry Development Strategy as an example of supporting Australia's future defence workforce.
Read the Defence Industry Development Strategy →
Australia's defence industry continues to experience increasing demand for skilled workers across engineering, digital, project management, trades and professional services. At the same time, many young people have limited awareness of the breadth of civilian opportunities available and often struggle to connect their strengths and interests with future careers.
Traditional career programs frequently generate awareness but do not provide meaningful insight into how young people discover opportunities, develop confidence in their capabilities or progress towards future pathways.
The challenge was not simply attracting more students to defence industry careers.
It was creating a practical and scalable way to:
Greenbeam approached Forge Your Future as a workforce discovery and early talent mobility exercise.
Rather than focusing solely on occupations or qualifications, the program was designed around a simple principle:
People make better decisions about their future when they understand their capabilities and can see how those capabilities connect to opportunity.
Using Greenbeam's capability-based methodology and technology, the program enabled students to:
This shifted the conversation from:
"What job do I want?"
to:
"What am I good at, and where could those strengths take me?"
Importantly, Greenbeam's approach enabled the program to do more than deliver content. It provided visibility of how students were engaging, where interests were emerging and which experiences created deeper participation and pathway exploration.
In doing so, Forge Your Future became more than a career awareness campaign. It became a practical mechanism for understanding and developing future workforce capability.
The program combined digital and face-to-face experiences, including:
By creating multiple entry points for participation, students could engage at different depths depending on their interests, readiness and aspirations.
| Measure | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Australians reached through direct activity, media and advertising | 6,978,685 |
| Secondary students engaged | 15,134 |
| Parents and caregivers reached | 1,073,882 |
| Teachers engaged | 199 |
| Students completing career discovery testing | 1,563 |
| Students completing all enabled career discovery activities | 335 |
| Students completing defence-industry learning content | 7,955 |
| Students undertaking virtual work experience | 2,220 |
| Defence industry mentors engaged | 34 |
The program exceeded its original engagement targets and generated strong demand well beyond its initial South Australian focus.
The program:
Importantly, the program showed that workforce challenges often begin long before recruitment. Building future capability requires earlier intervention, greater visibility of potential and stronger connections between people and opportunity.
Forge Your Future demonstrated the value of applying workforce discovery principles at the earliest stages of the talent pipeline.
By combining project delivery, capability methodology and technology, Greenbeam enabled the program to move beyond awareness raising and become a practical demonstration of how workforce discovery, pathway visibility and early talent mobility can be achieved at scale.
The result was not simply a successful career engagement program.
It was the creation of a repeatable model for identifying, engaging and connecting Australia's future workforce with emerging industry opportunities.
As industries continue to face growing workforce pressures, the lessons from Forge Your Future reinforce a simple but powerful principle:
When people can see their capabilities and understand where those capabilities connect to opportunity, better workforce outcomes follow.
To learn how Greenbeam can help build workforce visibility, contact us or explore the Forge Your Future program.
