A study by law firm "King and Wood Mallesons" involving more than a hundred senior executives have found almost 80 per cent cited attracting and retaining skilled labour as a priority.
More than half say the wider labour market issues are causing their companies problems with managing associated cyber risks.
Jason Yu's IT company has been operating for around a decade.
But hiring specialist IT engineers has been tough in recent times.
"We receive quite a lot of candidates each time we try to hire people, but actually it's quite a small percentage (are) actually qualified.”
While his company has looked overseas for staff, that's proved challenging.
And he's not alone based on survey results from law firm King and Wood Mallesons...
The firm's Meredith Paynter says the survey revealed retaining and attracting skilled labour has become a top concern for the vast majority of business leaders.
"The impact it has on the ability of businesses to build back from the pandemic shutdowns, it's reflective in survey responses regarding managing supply chain challenges, you need people with skills to help solve those problem."
Council of Small Business Organisations of Australia, chief executive, Alexi Boyd says attracting and retaining staff has become a huge issue.
"Everyone is experiencing staff shortages and its increasingly difficult to find the right staff retain them and importantly compete with big business around the corner that might be able to offer incentives that small businesses simply cannot."
Ms Boyd says it doesn't matter what type of business it is, the experience is the same, when it comes to finding staff.
She says after Australia shut its doors during the pandemic, the time has come to welcome people once again.
"It's trying to encourage people to come and especially skilled migrants to work and live in this country, perhaps we need to examine their long term prospects what can we do to encourage them to remain and seek that residency status, is that something we can do to make it more desirable because we are competing in an international space and we need to compete with other countries for those international students for those skilled migrants and to bring in the people we need to help small business grow and prosper."
The federal government has indicated a more permanent pathway is needed for skilled workers as well as a fix for the temporary migrant backlog.
September's jobs and skills summit at Parliament House will address those issues at a difficult time for businesses big and small.
