Catapult helps people to find employment in a variety of industries.
Child Care
Rachel’s aspiration was to start a career in child care. She had some work volunteering for a local child-care centre, in animal care and customer-service at Orana Park and at a riding school. She also had worked as a house cleaner. Catapult developed a CV for her, composed and aided her in writing cover letters, and guided her in interview preparedness and presentation. She approached many employers and applied to most jobs sent her and she got interviews. Rachel is now launching her career in her chosen field having landed a job at SKIDS St Teresa’s Burnside, an early-primary aged child care centre. She found this job on her own, applied for it and attended the interview without requiring any further assistance from her Catapult consultant. Additionally with Catapult’s encouragement she is looking to intern with PORSE (child care programme) in the New Year. Well done Rachel!
IT
Shane started on a voluntary basis with Callaghan Innovation, who develop and research technologies for assisting people with disabilities, to gain experience in a work environment. He started out doing various small programming tasks for some of the research projects that they had running. They found that he fitted into their environment quite well and they managed to achieve a Mainstream funded programme for him. As a result of the longer term contract they were able to involve him in larger projects that were strategic to their research studies. Shane’s particular expertise is his flexibility with working in a range of programming environments and this skill they find very valuable as they are a small team working across a broad range of platforms. Shane has created a particularly elegant application that was tested in a major study based at Hillmorton High’s Upland Unit. This app was used to test the use of large touch tables as a teaching tool for encouraging groups of children who have autism to interact together. Callaghan Innovation feel that Shane’s input to the project has been very important and his enthusiasm to the project is part of the reason for its success.
Community Support Worker
Rohan had a solid work history including jobs in an insurance call centre, in a liquidator service, and has worked self-employed as a painter and gardener. Going back to the early 1990’s, he held roles in insurance companies as an insurance officer and underwriter. He also did volunteer work including telephone counselling at Lifeline and involvement with Mensline. When he was asked if he had considered looking into work as a community support worker his eyes lit up and although it wasn’t something he had yet considered, he said he was interested. After more discussion with our consultant, he really embraced the idea and saw how he could use his tools from his more counselling and support type positions. He applied for a role as a Community Support Worker and was very excited when he got called up and asked to come in for an interview. A week or so later he called us to say he got the job!
Masha’s Feedback on Catapult
