SUPPORT TO FIND MORE JOBS
JOBLESS hospitality and tourism workers will be encouraged to train up and search further afield in manufacturing, health or the marine industry, says the federal government’s newly appointed Employment tsar Jodi Brackenbury.
The region is one of 25 in Australia identified to be in need of the extra employment support as the JobKeeper stimulus package comes to a close in March.
As part of the program Gold Coast employers will be feeding into a Local Jobs and Skills Taskforce to shrink the city’s impending unemployment rate and identify projects of around $10,000 to $200,000 to help boost training and opportunity.
As of November an estimated 30,000 business on the Gold Coast were still on JobKeeper, designed to help companies significantly impacted by the coronavirus.
Since the end of the program was announced recruiters say they are seeing an increase in those seeking work.
Ms Brackenbury said plenty of opportunity was to be found in the marine, health and manufacturing sectors on the Gold Coast, among others.
“We want to help employers fill the employment gap now,” Ms Brackenbury said.
“We are ready to steer the city through the post COVID-19 recovery.
“The Gold Coast has been hit hard as a result of COVID, and the downturn of the hospitality and tourism industry has impacted the female population on the Gold Coast in particular.
“Our unemployment rate was sitting around 8 per cent when the rest of Australia is a 6.8 per cent so we need the support, and working with employers is our best chance.”
Ms Brackenbury, currently the executive manager of employment services at Access Community Services, said she believed the $62.8m federal program would pull the city out of its funk.
“There is a lot of opportunities out there, be open minded.
“The longer people stay unemployed the harder it is to get back into work.”
Member for McPherson Karen Andrews said the ground-up approach would help put people into jobs or set them up for new longterm careers. Tanya Abbey, the chief executive of Gold Coast-based recruitment agency Black Wolf Consulting, said the legal, IT, finance and marketing industries would also experience growth.
“We’ve witnessed our biggest January in the company’s eight-year history, placing over 60 permanent and temporary candidates in the past two-and-a-half weeks,” Mrs Abbey said.
“This number is really exciting because it means businesses are growing and people are feeling more confident in the space again.
“Coming out of JobKeeper, we know we’ll be really busy. We’re actively preparing for this now by finding and interviewing suitable candidates for the industries that will be in the highest demand.”