If you were an employer and had a job vacancy, who would you fill the position with? The person most qualified would be the logical answer. What if this person wasn’t a local, should that change your choice? And if you couldn’t fill the vacancy and an employment agency could fill it with a suitable overseas candidate should you ignore this and continue on under resourced, putting the businesses future at risk. There have been some point scoring exercises happening about these situations, where the employer (or employment agency) has been painted as the ‘bady’ in who they recruit. Yet arguably all they’ve done is acted logically, fill the position with the best candidate.
An extension of this point scoring is happening with the Council’s $200K Adani worker relocation carrot. What about the locals? The 4700 and 4701 post code already give people living in these post codes an advantage, if not enough 4700 and 4701 qualified candidates apply and Adani are forced to look elsewhere to fill their vacancies it would be beneficial to our local economy for the successful candidates to relocate here.
Of course, there will be the calls to train local unemployed and put on more apprentices. Warranted, but should the onus be only on employers to provide relevant training and put on more apprentices then they may need or can afford. What of the 2017 state government promised manufacturing hub that amongst other things was to jobmatch unemployed workers and support local businesses? Let’s hope it eventuates before the anticipated job boom is over.
Could the energy exerted in the point scoring over job recruitment practices be better used to ensuring our local youth are able to maximise the opportunities the anticipated job boom potentially offers.
Encouraging employers rather than castigating them will be arguably more effective in achieving this.
On way our local politicians could do this is look at what former Gladstone Mayor Col Brown did back in the 1980’s. He visited Gladstone businesses and encouraged them to put on apprentices, not employ them but timeshare them. Get the businesses to commit putting apprentices on for 3 months, a year, or full-term; a period that suited them operationally and financially. GAGAL, a not for profit business he helped create, would employ the apprentices required and oversee their placement and training. Many of today’s long time Gladstone baby boomers would be able to attribute their working careers from the start and diversity GAGAL gave them. Timesharing the training of an apprentice is still an option, but are employers aware of it. Are our local politicians directly engaging with local employers to encourage, educate them about apprentice recruitment options?
Then there are the potential apprentices themselves, are they doing, or even know, the hard yards to find employment? Knocking on potential employer doors, demonstrating initiative, taking advantage of opportunities when presented. After all most apprentice/trainee positions are not advertised, they are filled by person’s doing the hard yards. If a class of budding journalists were asked who was interested to regularly write a newspaper column like this one, but on innovation and the start-up culture, for free but get their name attributed to it, would it be unreasonable to expect at least one enquirer, one that sees this as an opportunity to get an inside advantage to getting a job with the paper on completing (or even before) completing their degree. Yet not one even made an enquiry when this offer was made!
Does ‘expectation’ lead youth to not wanting to do or educated on what hard yards actually involves? Does society, the education system sanction conformity more than individualism and if so, are youth less likely to display personal initiative and stand out?
These are the areas energy needs to be exerted on to get the most from the looming jobs boom, especially for our youth. Point scoring may get media coverage, but our expectations should be higher than that, particularly of our politicians.