Careers advice for navigating pathways video

Jazmine (host):

So you are a careers adviser and you're helping kids decide what part they want to take job wise. I've got so many questions, but first off, I'm wondering, are there any prerequisites that students need when wanting to partake in an SBAT?

Kathy:

I wouldn’t call them prerequisites, probably just some recommendations that I think for them to do an SBAT to be successful in. So first is to have the right attitude. I do feel like you got to have the right attitude in order to complete a part-school part-time work situation. Second thing is that you need to be ready to be in an adult learning environment. So be ready to be independent, take initiative and make sure you're up to date with your schoolwork, but as well as committing to part-time work at the same time. And then last and not least, I do think that they need to think about a vocational pathway. They're not ready to leave school, but at least they're thinking about heading in that direction in the future.

Jazmine:

And in what way are you helping these students? What does an average day look like for you?

Kathy:

It can be pretty crazy sometimes, but I do love my job. Most of the day, it's pretty much helping out the students or school, or even the parent community understand what they want to do the future in terms of students. I do work with a lot of local businesses and supporting our students in work experience, getting them work, or even getting them to come in and connecting content to what they learn at school, into real world situations, which is really exciting. And that's pretty much my typical day. Every day is quite different, though.

Jazmine:

Cool. And on the topic of local businesses, are you finding that they're keen to work with students given that COVID is happening and stuff like that? How's that been going?

Kathy:

You know what, it's actually been pretty positive for us. We're really fortunate that we have a foundation of businesses that do want to work with our students and have been really successful in finding employees here. And also another thing is that, yeah, COVID was a little bit of a blockage, but it wasn't something permanent as we call it. It's more so postpone. We're having conversations and how to make sure that we're meeting the, I guess, regulations to ensure that everyone is safe during this time, but no, it hasn't really stopped anything.

Jazmine:

That's good to know. Can you share any success stories of students with us?

Kathy:

Yeah, so not necessarily in SBAT, but we've had students who have graduated from our job ready class. So, we actually had a student during COVID funny enough, when we all went into lockdown and he just realized that online learning wasn't for him. And he actually put an ad on Facebook about himself saying that, "I'm an apprentice. I've done my white card. I've done my first aid. I've done all these extracurricular things at school and I'm looking for a job." And funny enough, his neighbor saw it and then gave him a job trial. And now he's working as an air conditioning and refrigerating apprentice.

Jazmine:

Wow.

Kathy:

And he's killing it out there, which is so great. And I think it's just one of those things that makes you think that you just need a bit of a spark at school. And if you give them the platform, then anything's possible.

Jazmine:

What are the growth areas?

Kathy:

I do feel like anything is a growth area at this point. No student should ever rule out what's an option. Because if you look at the Smart andSkilled website that the government's provided, they have subsidized a lot of the courses. So if any student that wants to pursue a vocational pathway, leaving school, has so many options to try things at TAFE, that the opportunities are endless. There's agriculture, agrifoods to hair and beauty to being a dental assistant, animal studies, mechanics, construction, it's endless. It's funny when you look at the industry, there's so many little industries within it and you don't know, unless you go search it up

Jazmine:

It feels like there's a lot of doom and glam and people are really stressing about COVID at the moment. What is something that we can be optimistic about?

Kathy:

I think anyone should be optimistic about their future. We shouldn't be penciled in that we're going to do something, one thing for the rest of our lives. I think in my lessons, when I teach the students, you're going to do at least 10 jobs in your lifetime and you're going to keep changing and you're going to get bored and you're going to want to do something new and it's okay not to know. So I think to see that people are scared is a good thing. It's a little bit of fear that's going to be a positive challenge and anything's possible if you let fate kind of take its path, but you also got to take the initiative. So, I think the opportunities are going to be endless and you got to take them when they come.

Jazmine:

Yeah. I love that. Thank you so much for the chat.

Kathy:

That's all right. Thank you.

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