workforce
Breaking down the barriers
New approaches needed to
help unskilled and older people
find work in aged care.
Kasy Chambers interviewed by Megan Tran
A
nglicare Australia has called for
urgent upgrading of employment
services following the release of
its Jobs Availability Snapshot 2018.
Kasy Chambers, the organisation’s
executive director, says a new approach
is needed to help people find work.
“The job market isn’t working for
everyone. It’s failing those who need the
most help to find work – those without
qualifications or recent experience.”
Chambers adds that those who have
difficulty finding employment spend
on average five years looking for work,
and this could be more challenging
for senior citizens, who face blatant
discrimination.
30 agedcareinsite.com.au
She also says entry-level jobs for low-
skilled job seekers are disappearing, which
is an opportunity for aged care.
“The aged care and disability sectors are
growing. If we planned our workforce, we
could create pathways for people to build
careers where they are needed.”
Aged Care Insite spoke with Chambers to
find out more about Anglicare’s report.
ACI: What was the aim of the Jobs
Availability Snapshot 2018?
KC: We did this report to dig a little bit
deeper than the overall conversation that
there are lots of jobs or unemployment’s
going down.
What we’re doing in this job snapshot is
looking at a group of people and a group of
jobs. The group of people we’re interested
in are those who face extra barriers when
trying to get into the workforce. Those
barriers might be that they haven’t been in
the workforce for a while – they’ve been
caring for family, for example. They might
be a young person who doesn’t have any
relevant experience yet, or somebody
with English as a second, third or fourth
language. They might be somebody with
a mild disability who doesn’t qualify for a
disability support pension.
The government classifies these people
as Stream C in the Jobactive network. It
means people who have the most difficulty
or likelihood of difficulty in terms of getting
into work.
So, we’re interested in those people, and
we’re interested in the type of job they’re
probably going to be able to get, given
that they usually have lower qualifications
at the moment. I mean, everybody
can get better qualifications, but at the
moment they probably have lower relevant
qualifications and probably don’t have
recent experience.
So the type of jobs we look at are what
are specified as Level 5 jobs. These are
jobs that don’t require a degree or those
kinds of things. In fact, what the job
classification says, and this is an Australian
and New Zealand government tool, is that
Level 5 jobs typically require a Certificate I,
compulsory secondary education and/or
on-the-job training. So you’ve still got to
have a bit of background to get into them.
That’s what we look at in the snapshot:
people who have more barriers to work than
might be in the usual population, and jobs
that are entry‑level jobs. So we’re looking at
this to pull apart some of the statistics.
What we found this year is that for the
number of people in the Stream C – the
folk who are going to struggle a bit more
than most – there were 4.25 people across
Australia for every entry‑level job.
Before I break that down in terms of
regions, an important thing to remember