Australia's 35,800 trades job vacancy predicted in the mining sector by 2015 will likely be occupied by migrants as resource companies deal with the effects of not hiring the expected number of apprentices in an industry as big.

The federal government's National Resources Sector Employment Taskforce in its final report released late last week has proposed an overhaul of temporary migration to help companies attract overseas labour, particularly during construction.

Industry sources yesterday said while the projected shortfall had not begun to bite, there were already signs of it materializing in areas such as welders and pipefitters.

According to report of the taskforce chaired by federal Labor MP Gary Gray, there were not many options to cope with the short-term scant supply other than migrating people.

"The main short-term options for increasing supply of skills include recruiting from the unemployed and through temporary or permanent migration."

It was objective to suppose the large majority of the trades positions would be filled by migrants, according to National Institute of Labour Studies research fellow Sue Richardson, who has accomplished skills shortage studies for the Australian Minerals Council in the past.

"The migrant solution is so easy and from the employer point of view much preferable to going into the complicated kind of participation programs (for unemployed) that require work with government and social welfare agencies and with people who are not, to use their language, job-ready," Professor Richardson said.

The country's major employers in the resource sector, BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, have already cautioned that skills shortages will come back to previous boom levels in 2007.

Both miners have strong laborforces in Western Australia, where they will be competing with big LNG projects for workers.

To narrow the number of migrants needed in the longer term, the taskforce advised the resource sector to significantly lift the total of apprentices it hired.

The mining sector argues that existing apprentice training models do not accommodate their requirements.