In the three months to August, nearly 76,000 jobs were added in professional, scientific and technical services, Bureau of Statistics figures show.

Jobs growth was also strong in administrative services, education and training and information media and telecommunications.

But traditional blue-collar workers did not fare so well – employment shrank in mining, manufacturing, construction and agriculture in the three months to the end of August.

The employment figures follow the release of Reserve Bank research showing that "non-routine" jobs have grown as a share of employment at the expense of "routine" jobs.

The share of "routine manual" jobs has fallen by 10 percentage points in the past three decades. There's also been a decline in "cognitive routine" jobs since the early 2000s. Alexandra Heath, the head of the Reserve's economic analysis department, said in a speech on Wednesday that technological advances have allowed a growing number of routine jobs to be automated or done in other parts of the world where labour costs are lower.

In contrast, non-routine jobs have become steadily more important.

"These jobs tend to be more difficult to automate for a number of reasons," Ms Heath said. "For example, some non-routine occupations, such as architecture, may require creativity and the ability to solve non-routine problems, while others, such as child care work, intrinsically require a physical human presence."

A recent NSW government report predicted the proportion of knowledge-intensive jobs in the economy would rise from 48 per cent to 61 per cent by 2036.

Ms Heath said the healthcare and social assistance industry has made the largest contribution to employment growth over the past 15 years and most of this has been in "non-routine work". After health care, the two industries that have made the largest contributions to growth in non-routine jobs over that period are professional, scientific and technical services and education and training.

The Australian workforce may have a comparative advantage in many occupations in the non-routine category because of our relatively high education levels. But Ms Heath said the increase in the relative importance of non-routine jobs "suggests that people will need skills that are not easily replicated by technology, such as social intelligence, creativity and complex manual dexterity".

The bureau's quarterly detailed labour force figures showed the mining sector shed 10,100 jobs in the three months to August. Mining employment has plunged from 277,000 to 211,000 since the mining boom began to fade three years ago – a decline of about 24 per cent. Mining now makes up 1.8 per cent of all employment.

The healthcare and social assistance industry remains Australia's biggest employer with 1.52 million jobs (nearly 13 per cent of all employment) despite a drop in the three months to August. Retail trade is the second biggest employer with 1.22 million jobs (10.2 per cent) with construction third with 1.07 million (9 per cent).

Over the past year 179,400 were added lifting the total number of jobs in Australia to just under 12 million.

Bureau figures showed jobs growth had been especially robust in regional NSW. Almost 60 per cent of all regional jobs nationwide were added in NSW over the past 12 months.