We are presently holding events to promote employment for people with disability - nor surprise there, that's our job.
What has been a surprise is the willingness of employers to come along and listen and more importantly, to consider adopting inclusive employment practices across their organisations.
Part of the program calls upon me to speak on why that's important and whether or not hiring people with disability works and I have been recalling my first experience in suggesting to a business owner that their business might think about employing a couple of students from my TAFE course. This event seems commonplace now, but at the time this was new concept and, while I was surprised they weren't as keen on the idea as me, I don't know that we deserved to be ridiculed!
Come forward almost 30 years and thanks to their eagerness to work and the skills of my very talented staff, pretty much every working day at least 5 people with disability join the privileged ranks of tax payers.
And we aren't talking about make-work or menial task only employment.
It's an insiders truth that people on DSP have only to work 8hrs a week to meet contract minimums and there are no incentives to aim higher. In fact, splitting a full time role into 5 x 8 minimum hour positions earns the 'service' provider 5 times the financial and Star Ratings recognition.
At NOVA we wanted to avoid devaluing the possible contribution of people with disability and we wanted to promote inclusion and with those goals in mind adjusted our internal bonus system to only recognise work that is 15hrs a week or more.
What happened?
8hr positions pretty much evaporated as the employment specialists learned to aim for more. Likewise we have recognised greater than minimums in a range of other key performance indicators with equally pleasing results including our most recent spotlight on placement of Apprenticeships and Traineeships.
This has seen participation in these career foundation roles move into double digit numbers (total percentage of placements) in a broad range of employment.
With NOVA's overall performance up by over 15% on our 2016 first quarter results and with record numbers of people assisted into some first class jobs - just maybe we've turned a corner - I can tell you one thing for certain - no one laughs at us now!
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