A mobile jobseeker support program which had its gestation in regional Western Australia has been extended into the ACT region to help better equip the long-term unemployed to find local work.
The director of The Salvation Army's Employment Plus agency, Dr Graeme White, said the issues found in WA region around Busselton and Bunbury equally applied in remote areas elsewhere.
"Many people from these WA remote areas kept cancelling their appointments with us," he said.
"When we asked why, we discovered there were very good reasons.
"Because so many of [unemployed] people didn't have access to a vehicle or didn't have a driver's licence and the transport infrastructure was weak in that region, they couldn't travel to us.
"So we took the service to them."
The Salvation Army Employment Plus is a federal government-appointed agency which has been providing employment services for jobseekers since 1998 when this role was subcontracted outside the former Commonwealth Employment Service.
Since then, it has placed some 600,000 people in part-time, fulltime or casual employment. It currently has around 32,000 people across all its programs.
"When we recently surveyed our jobseekers, we found that 45 per cent of them did not have access to a vehicle, which again re-emphasises the problem," he said.
On board the Salvos' van are two wi-fi system - one which offers a secure network connection for use by Employment Plus staff, and another which allows clients to hunt the web on laptops for job ads and opportunities.
The van has two work stations inside and one outside for appointments, a bank of solar batteries on the roof to keep it powered up in remote areas, USB charging points, coffee, tea and biscuits, and a satellite phone connection for travelling out beyond mobile range.
He said the face-to-face relationship between staff and clients - particularly the long-term, and disadvantaged unemployed - was vital and offered far greater advantages than a chat over the phone.
And another side benefit for the service also emerged as the van plied its way between the small towns.
"One of things we found while touring around these little towns was that were actually attracting attention, and building a relationship with local employers and community service providers," he said.
"As a result of that greater local visibility, we found that jobs that had been less obvious or semi-invisible were suddenly coming to the surface."
The new local mobile service will stretch from the smaller towns around the Snowy Mountains up to Goulburn and into the far west of NSW.
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