LOOK AT SKILLS TO QUALIFY FASTER
Don’t discount previous workplace experience when re-skilling for a career change, writes Melanie Burgess
THERE may be fewer jobs for manufacturers, secretaries and farmers but there are more for nurses, electricians and carers.
Workers just need to be nimble enough to move where the market takes them.
National Centre for Vocational Education Research report When One Door
Closes reveals from 2006 to 2011, there were 30,200 fewer secretaries and 15,300 fewer mixed crop and livestock farmers employed in Australia.
Meanwhile, another 200,000 jobs were forecast to be lost in motor vehicle manufacturing as a result of Holden, Ford and Toyota stopping Australian operations by 2017.
But from 2006 to 2011, an extra 34,300 registered nurses, 30,800 aged and disabled carers, 30,000 general clerks, 22,700 child carers and 20,500 electricians were employed.
East Coast Apprenticeships chief executive Alan Sparks says workers forced to re-skill can often become qualified in less time by taking experience and skills into account.
“For the Holden workers in SA, within the production line work they do, they have a Certificate III in Production Assembly,” he says.
“TAFE SA mapped the qualities and competencies involved across to the more traditional mechanical fitter trade and the advice was (the existing qualification) would represent about 47 per cent of that traditional trade qualification.
“Holden and Qantas workers (made redundant can) look at the skills they have acquired working with those organisations and the opportunities they have through recognition of prior learning.”
MAX Employment managing director Deborah Homewood says career changers usually also have soft skills that are transferable.
“Worked in hospitality? You can multitask under pressure. You’re a sales agent? You have good verbal communication skills. Office worker? You are computer literate,” she says.
“In construction? You have experience in workplace health and safety, transport and logistics.”
Australian Training Awards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Student of the Year 2014 runner-up Chris Medcraft enrolled in a Certificate IV in Community Services when he was made redundant after 32 years in the paper industry.
“It’s taken me five or six years but I kept learning in the TAFE system to get the skills I need to improve,” he says.