I recently came across in interesing report on Australia's transport and logistics industry.

The report, highlighting the participation and importance of Australia's transport and logistics industry, was created by the Australian Logistics Council, in association with Queensland Transport and the Transport and Logistics Industry Skills Council.

The purpose of the report was to quantify the size of the Australian workforce participating in T&L activities and to provide some insight into its structure.

Some of the reports major findings were:

• Transport and Logistics workforce participation was approximately 1,246,406 persons as at August 2006.
• This number equates to 13.9 percent of the national workforce aggregate;
• 72.4 percent (or 847,582 persons) were attributed to the freight sector, 9.4 percent (or 109,781 persons) to passenger transport while the remaining 18.2 percent (212,406) could be attributed to either the freight or passenger sectors.
• The largest single educational level is year 10 or below which constitutes 35.5 percent of those participating in T&L activities.
• 33.0 percent of all participants attained an educational level greater than year 12.
• More than three quarters (76.7 percent) of those participating in T&L activities are male.

This is useful information for businesses such as eCargo, as many of these these people are our end users - the people who would use eCargo. It tells us our target market makes up a large proportion of the workforce (we'll assume a similar proportion in NZ) and that the majority are male.

You can view the full report as a PDF file here.