By Emma-Lee Oliver | Senior Payroll Consultant, Australian Payroll Association
I have lost count of how many times I have heard, “We just need someone who can hit the ground running.”
I understand it. Payroll doesn’t have the luxury of a slow learning curve. The pay has to go out. The compliance risk is real. The questions don’t stop just because someone is new.
But lately, I have been wondering whether that mindset is quietly setting us up for a bigger problem.
We are starting to see more burnout across the profession. Payroll professionals who have been in the game for years — who have managed award changes, system implementations, remediation projects and endless legislative updates — are deciding it’s time to move on. Some are stepping sideways into different roles. Others are leaving payroll altogether.
And when they go, they take decades of knowledge with them.
The Experience Catch-22
For as long as I can remember, I have said the same thing: if we don’t give people experience, we’ll eventually run out of experienced people to hire.
Yet we continue to advertise roles asking for three to five years’ payroll experience as a minimum. We hesitate when someone from HR, admin, finance or accounts shows genuine interest but hasn’t processed a full pay cycle before. We tell ourselves we simply don’t have the time to train.
So what happens? The same relatively small group of experienced payroll professionals gets recycled around the market. Recruiters approach the same people. Organisations compete for the same CVs. Salaries rise, expectations rise and workloads don’t necessarily ease.
It becomes a closed loop.
Meanwhile, we haven’t created enough entry points into payroll to build the next layer underneath.
Burnout Isn’t Just About Busy Periods
Yes, payroll can be intense at certain times of the year. But burnout in our profession isn’t just about volume.
It is the constant accountability. Every pay run matters. Every interpretation matters. We are the ones reconciling legislation with system capability, answering employee queries about why something looks different, reassuring HR and providing comfort to executives that compliance is under control.
That pressure, year after year, without developing new talent to share the load, isn’t sustainable.
When a senior payroll professional resigns, the immediate response is usually to find someone with the same level of experience. But what if there aren’t enough of them left?
Investing in New Talent
Taking on someone new to payroll does require effort. There is training. There are questions. There will be mistakes (hopefully small, controlled ones). Productivity may dip before it improves.
But that short-term investment builds long-term stability.
New starters bring curiosity. They ask, “Why do we do it this way?” and sometimes that question alone uncovers outdated processes or legacy practices we’ve never stopped to challenge. They’re often more adaptable to new systems and technology because they haven’t spent years doing it the same way. And with the right mentoring, they grow surprisingly quickly.
Most importantly, they become the experienced payroll professionals we will need in five or ten years.
I have seen teams that deliberately create junior pathways, bringing in payroll administrators or officers with no prior payroll experience and giving them structured exposure to awards, compliance and reporting over time. It doesn’t solve today’s workload overnight but it absolutely changes the future outlook of the function.
Protecting the Profession
Payroll is not just data entry. It is interpretation, analysis, communication and risk management rolled into one. It deserves the same succession planning we apply to finance, HR or IT.
If we continue to rely solely on hiring experienced payroll professionals without bringing new people into the profession, we are shrinking our own pipeline. The burnout we are seeing now is a warning sign.
Sometimes the most strategic hire isn’t the person who can process the next pay run without guidance. It is the person who, with support, will confidently lead the function down the track.
If we want a sustainable payroll profession in Australia, we need to grow it, not just compete for what’s left.
