Job hunters rejoice
Newly labelled Island Employment a one-stop shop for job hunters
When it comes to finding work, you could say it pays to be equipped with the right tools for the job.
And the good news for job hunters in Cape Breton is that there is a plethora of resources to be found at the new Sydney offices of Island Employment, a provincial agency formerly known as the Employability Project that once offered employment services only to people with disabilities.
Operations manager Graham Carmichael says the new centre offers an abundance of resources and services that are accessible to everybody.
“We are no longer specifically an agency only for clients with disabilities — now anybody that’s looking for a job can come in and access our services,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter how educated you are, it doesn’t matter whether you have a university degree, or whether you’ve never held down a job for more than a couple of weeks.”
Carmichael said the centre’s services start with an appointment and a meeting with a case manager, who helps assess the strengths and needs of the client. In addition to its case managers, the centre also has a facilitator who offers workshops on topics such as resumé writing, how to use social media, and how to search for work.
A new position at Island Employment is that of employer engagement specialists, who work not with job seekers, but with the businesses that have open jobs that need to be filled.
“They develop the relationships with those employers so that when employers need to do their hiring they will hopefully come back to us,” said Carmichael.
“Then, we can do jobmatching with the list of qualified people we’ve been working with who might be able fill the vacancies that the employers would have available.”
While the new centre is in the same George Street building that it was when it was called EmployAbility, it’s now on the ground floor and is equipped with all the state-ofthe-art technology. And many of its resources are shared with the adjoining Ann Terry Project, part of the EmployAbility family of services that is, in turn, under the jurisdiction of Nova Scotia Works.
Carmichael said the proximity of the two resource centres is mutually beneficial.
“For a variety of different reasons there are some people who need to have a bit more separated space — we have that here now in our new facility, so Ann Terry clients can continue to come and have a women-only facility where they can access the services like they always have,” he said.
There are also Island Employment centres in Cheticamp, Inverness and Port Hawkesbury. Collectively, they presently have 32 staff members, 21 of whom work at the two-office Sydney centre.
The new facility, located at 500 George St., will hold its official grand opening on March 17 from 10 a.m.-12 p.m.