Aged Care Insite Issue 110 Dec-Jan 2019 | Page 33

workforce is that, at this stage, somebody in Stream C can probably only apply for a Level 5 job. They’re not going to be able to apply necessarily for jobs that require degrees or more experience. However, anyone with a degree can apply for a Level 5 position. It might be that people are finishing uni and they want to get into work quickly. It might be that there’s someone around who wants some extra hours. Still, this is a very conservative way of looking at what that experience is going to be like for those 4.25 disadvantaged job seekers for every entry‑level job. I’d like to just flick through some areas where those figures differ. Australia is a big country, we’ve got lots of different economies, and they’re all moving up and down. Even within each state, things are different. But in places like WA, where we’re coming off the mining boom, there are nearly six disadvantaged job seekers per job. In South Australia, where we’ve seen large‑scale industry reform and restructure, it’s 8.5. In Tasmania, it’s 12 entry‑level job seekers per job. So, it’s a difficult situation. The reason we want to look at this is that we’ve got to stop blaming people for not having jobs. We’ve got to look at what different things we need to do to the policy in this area, rather than just saying people should get a job. So, that’s a brief tour of the snapshot and why we did it. What does this mean for people trying to find jobs in aged care and nursing? Well, one of the things we’ve found is that often jobs are advertised with greater qualifications than they need. For example, occasionally an employer will think, “Gee, we never need that person to drive, but it might be nice if they had a driving licence, just in case.” Well, by writing that in there, immediately they’ve wiped out a number of people. We’ve seen that occasionally in areas like aged care or disability care. One of our agencies, Anglicare Tasmania, given that their stats are some of the highest for this, have been thinking, “Well, if we want to employ local people to work with people with disabilities or in our aged care, and if we can’t find people with full-on qualifications, let’s have a look at which roles people can do without full-on qualifications.” So they’ve been looking at getting local people into entry‑level jobs. Not jobs involving nursing roles or complex aged care tasks, but jobs where someone who’s elderly might want some house cleaning to help them stay in their own home, for example. What we’ve done there is make it easier for people without qualifications to enter those jobs with us. We’ve looked at restructuring how we interview, so we’re actually interviewing for aptitude, empathy, warmth and personality, and people don’t have to have all the sort of fancy words and things in those interviews. Once people are on board, we’ve also looked at making induction materials available in lots of different ways to cope with different levels of literacy and learning styles. What we’ve then done is worked with new people to get a Certificate II in domestic cleaning or in some of the entry into aged care units, and we reward people if they move through with a pay rise. So, we’ve taken out some of the complexity of tasks, looked then for people to fulfil entry‑level positions in our own agency, looked for people with the right aptitude and personality – someone who’s going to be suited to working with, caring for and being with elderly people – and then we’re training up after that. As for Jobactive, we need to do a lot more work there. Jobactive is a system funded by the federal government, where we’ve got employment services that work with people to help them find work. Unfortunately, one of the ways the system works is it rewards Jobactive providers for things that don’t necessarily get people into work or keep them in work. For example, it rewards providers for getting people into training. Not necessarily training that is appropriate for that person or for the job they want, but something that can be filled, that they can go to today. So it rewards a bit of activity and a bit of churn, and we see people being put into training that doesn’t get them anywhere, that might be inappropriate. It might be that someone who can’t stand for long periods is put into training as, for example, a hairdresser, and obviously that’s not going to work out. So we need to be working with the government to reset how Jobactive does that. We also need to be working with Jobactive to help them understand what aged care jobs look like, what nursing jobs look like, and what disability support jobs look like. That’s because there’s a burgeoning of need with the NDIS and consumer‑directed care in the aged care area for lots more people in that type of work, and we need to be helping the Jobactive people to understand that and to link in. Another issue is that people aged 55 or older are finding it difficult in the job seeking network. One of the things we found in our snapshot this year is that people in Stream C – who, by the government’s assessment, have a few more difficulties in accessing the workforce – spend an average of five years looking for work. Now, we don’t know the breakdown. We are going to make sure we do some work on this before our snapshot next year, but we have an intuition that it might be longer for older people. We certainly hear from older job seekers that it is harder for them, that there is a mindset that they should just wait out their time until they come off Newstart and go onto the age pension. We see quite blatant discrimination against older people. People assume that they’re not going to be au fait with some of the technology; they assume that they might not be as quick to learn. Of course, what they don’t take into account is that actually there are lots of jobs that can be done without technology, that in fact older people are often some of the quickest adopters of some of the We’ve looked at restructuring how we interview, so we’re actually interviewing for aptitude, empathy, warmth and personality... technology as well. So not only is this discrimination factually incorrect, it’s also unfounded in that there are so many jobs in aged care, nursing and disability support that don’t need some of these things. They actually need somebody who has some life experience, who is able to empathise and enjoy someone’s company. So I think we are looking at trying to make sure that people understand what those aged 55 or older bring to the workforce. There’s also another side to that question, and that is the fact that if you are 55 and on Newstart, the very poor amount of money you get is really going to impact. It’s low for everybody, but once you get to 55, coming up to retirement age, if you’re not topping up your super, that’s going to make for a different outcome for you and a different quality of life in retirement. So that’s something else we’re very concerned about at Anglicare.  ■ agedcareinsite.com.au 31