Beeline to employment

SINCE launching in 2020, the GROW Ballarat Beeline Program has aimed to support mature female job seekers find employment with Ballarat Health Services.

Involving eleven participants, the Beeline program included mentoring and work ready workshops to give participants knowledge and experience to help their changes at gaining a job role at BHS.

GROW Ballarat manager Anne Scott said the program distinguishes itself from others as it’s driven by industry need, and not training job seekers for employment opportunities that may not exist.

“Instead of gathering together job seekers, we have partnered with an industry and identified a workforce need, that’s the first step,” she said.

“So the Beeline Program can be flexible to find a group of staff to meet the current needs, currently there’s a huge need particularly in aged care.”

At the program’s graduation ceremony, participant Judy Dwyer said the experience had been amazing and enjoyable.

“Initially, I moved here from Ocean Grove and I didn’t know anybody and I’ve always wanted to do nursing my whole life” she said. “So, when the opportunity came up, I thought how good is this, I better get in there.

“I love it, meeting people and learning things.”

BHS director of clinical education and practice development Denille Beardmore said partnering with Beeline had many benefits.

“This was a great way of connecting with a program to seek real employment opportunities from members of our community who may have found it difficult traditionally,” she said.

“The first two groups that we are focusing on is our certificate level workers in residential aged care, so that individual support care worker, and business admin and we’re focused on the mature female worker because we felt that was something that our workforce hadn’t done very well.

“This was a way to grow our own workforce and instead of doing that internally, it’s linking with our community groups and partners to work on strategies together to achieve some great things.”