Empowering young people to gain employment

In December seven students graduated with their Certificate in Engineering offered by Northern Futures based in the northern suburbs. Three of the seven graduates are starting jobs with Northern Future employment partners and the other 4 have interviews for potential positions.

What makes this makes this different? While the G21 regions unemployment rate was 5.6% in the most recent Department of Jobs and Small Business – quarterly unemployment rate (September 2018) the unemployment rate in Corio/Norlane is 20.6%.

Northern Futures provides socially inclusive and strength-based programs to support disadvantaged individuals in the northern suburbs of Geelong, to build skills and achieve sustainable employment out comes that helps transform lives.

With your donations Northern Futures received a $12,000 grant to support some of their students, including most recent Certificate in Engineering students through the ‘Empower’ program. While their certificate provided them with hard skills, the ‘Empower’ program provides the students with some of the soft skills that will help them be successful in obtaining and retaining a job.

The program helps them delve deep and to look at their life through a new lens. Through the program they explore their values, beliefs and motivations; their character strengths; the need to expand their comfort zones; wheel of life balance and stability; the time quadrants and how to manage time effectively; reframing perspectives; above the line thinking; the stages of change; problem solving; resilience; effective communication with self and others; the hidden rules and cues in the work place; the 5 language registers and importance of code switching; how to live a healthy life; impacts of stress and illness; goal setting, optimism, taking act ion and building confidence for a better life.

Through the completion of their Certificate and the “Empower” program they have been given the opportunity to become agents of change for themselves, their families, others and their community.