Aged Care Insite Issue 110 Dec-Jan 2019 | Page 32

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