Perseverance Pays Off As Skills Are Put To Use
The Age
Sunday October 15, 1995
TWENTY-five-year-olds may be ``cheap", and employers may think they can train a young person to be just what they want, but someone aged 40-something, or older, can offer ``experience, wisdom and value to a business", says a CES consultant. Adriana Wilson, a case manager at Box Hill, has an empathy with people in the ``mature" category.
Out of the paid workforce for 13 years while she raised children, from 1975 to 1988, Ms Wilson knows it's hard to climb back. She advised: ``When you're looking for work and haven't worked for several years, you have to use every skill you've got." Ms Wilson was recently able to use this knowledge to help Annabel Sperring, who at 41 wanted a paid job again. She had raised two children to the ages of 12 and 14. ``They're old enough not to need me as much and I could do with some extra income," she said. However, she had not been in the workforce since she was a keypunch operator for IBM in Malaysia 13 years years ago.
Ms Wilson commented: ``I was very conscious that she hadn't worked here before (in Australia) and that she'd been a long time at home. I said that it may take time but we'd get there.
So we discussed every possibility."
Ms Wilson told her: ``You have learnt skills where you least expect it - even as a housewife - and must make the most of them." She ``had a good attitude, she was positive and determined to get work", said Ms Wilson. ``We looked at some of the skills she had." The most relevant were managing a household budget, working in her children's school tuckshop, where she had prepared food and handled money, plus her hobby, chocolate-making. She gave these as gifts to friends and had sold her gourmet novelty chocolates at a market when she lived in Queensland.
At an interview at The Chocolate Box in Camberwell's Burke Road, Ms Sperring was enthusiastic about the business and showed photos of her handmade chocolates. She was offered her job as a sales assistant. ``We'd like to help everyone get jobs," said Ms Wilson.
``But sometimes it's hard. A lot of people who've been unemployed or out of the workforce for a long time are afraid of being rejected. They're also afraid because they realise that the workforce has changed so much since they were in it." She knows that from experience. Since she had been away, at home with children, almost every workplace had started using computers. There was also a new vocabulary, she said, with words like downsizing, redundancy packages and human resources.
``Age becomes a problem if people have been out there and they're lacking skills. The forties (age-group) isn't too bad. The fifties have already been acknowledged by the Government as a risk factor. That was one of my problems. I had been home with the children and although I'd been back for a formal education, I realised that things had changed so much."
She encouraged people seeking jobs to accept ``something less, even if they know they can do more, just to get back into the workforce. It's so much easier to get a job if you're already working".
``Women need to keep their skills up. That's a bind, I know, because it costs a lot to have your children minded." While studying for a BA at Swinburne University of Technology, Ms Wilson did some stints of part-time work, such as at the TAB, handling telephone marketing.
``I wasn't in the area I wanted to be in, but I was back in the workforce and had more confidence." It wasn't until she was 45, with a psychology major, that she took up her job with the CES. ``I think I help people; I know what they go through."
© 1995 The Age