If all you want for Christmas is a job, your celebrations might start as early as next week when a travelling employment road show comes to the Eurobodalla.
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Organisers of Wednesday’s Jobs and Skills Expo have this week been recruiting employers with vacancies to get involved.
They hope 100 jobs will be offered to local people as a result of the Batemans Bay Soldiers Club event.
The Australian Government event will be the 68th expo in the series and the first in the Eurobodalla. It is targeted at areas with unemployment rates above the national average.
This week organisers sent a message to shire businesses: “We want your job”.
Spokesman Paul Creedon said he had attended 67 expos around Australia.
“I have seen people placed in jobs on the day,” he said.
“I have been involved with the expos since their inception and we know that 24,400 have been placed in jobs as a direct result.”
Baylink customer service acting manager Suzanne Harrington said the expo was about keeping local people in the area by keeping them in employment.
“This is a wonderful opportunity to do months’ worth of job-seeking in one day,” she said.
“We need to come together and make sure our jobs stay in the local area for local people. We need to keep open communication lines so we can assist citizens to find jobs and get skills. We also have some wonderfully skilled people and we need to create jobs so they don’t leave. We are trying to keep people in the area so we can continue to grow.”
The expos are part of a $3 billion Building Australia’s Future Workforce package.
Mr Creedon said local, state and national jobs would be advertised at the expo and job service providers and training organisations would attend.
He said jobseekers and employers loved the old-fashioned nature of the event.
“When people see that we are in town, they come in droves,” he said.
“When you bring a travelling road show to a community, it creates a buzz. Employers love it, because it is old school, they meet people one-on-one. They get the chance to eyeball a potential employee.
“It works both ways. People love to be able to hand their resume in and talk about a job, right there. Face-to-face contact works.”
If small businesses were too busy to attend, they should still forward their vacancies.
“We could have their job in front of hundreds of people,” he said.
“It does not matter if it is only for a couple of hours a week, because that job could change a person’s life.”
He said any jobseeker aged between 16 and 65 was welcome to attend and information would also be available about mining industry jobs.
Ms Harrington said parents re-entering the workforce could learn about how to get new skills and what assistance was available to them.
The expo runs from 10am to 3pm. To exhibit, place a vacancy or find out more, visit humanservices.gov.au/expos or phone 13 11 58.
