I've had prior experience with a couple of different employment services providers, and haven't been impressed. I've been told by the manager of one ESP that I should stop my part time study toward a BSc in Computer Science because "the government won't pay for it". I've had to take a six week contract working in a call centre (for Centrelink) which was one-and-a-half hour's drive (country driving, the majority of it) from where I lived, because the other option was losing access to Newstart - I didn't recover from that job financially for over six months (oddly enough, paying $50 for a tank full of fuel every 3 journeys tends to wipe out any benefit gained from working full time for six weeks), it put me twelve months behind in my studies, and it took me over eighteen months to recover from the stresses it imposed on me psychologically (I wound up working myself into a nervous breakdown between the job and the travel requirements). How this was supposed to be an improvement to my circumstances I've no idea. Incidentally, most of the people who were in the same intake as myself for that job were in similar circumstances to myself - people on Newstart or Sole Parent Pension who were obliged to take the first job offered or lose their benefit.

My partner spent the better part of twelve months looking for work, and reporting to one of these providers. In the first six months, they basically said "ten job search efforts a fortnight" and handed him a form to fill in (had to be their form - he couldn't just bring in a copy of a printout of what he'd done, even if the printout contained the same information. Nope, had to fill out the form). In the second six months, the whole thing got more intrusive. Firstly, he had to provide evidence of job search efforts (easy enough; copy everything to a thumb drive and show them each week when he reported in as well as filling out the form). Then, they started insisting that he had to perform his job search in their office, using their facilities (which were actually less suited to the process than the ones we had at home) under their supervision, and that he couldn't provide evidence of his home-based job search as a way of proving he'd fulfilled the job search requirement. In other words, even if he supplied evidence of having looked for work, he was effectively deemed to have lied about it. Your tax dollars at work, folks.

I've been to a few of the "courses" various employment service providers give on job search techniques, and most of them aren't adequate to any task except making it clear to someone who is unemployed that their unemployment is All Their Own Fault, and that being unemployed makes them A Terrible Person and They Should Be Ashamed Of Themselves for being a Burden On Society. As though somehow unemployment is something which will go away if you're just ashamed enough of it.

As someone with a mental illness, I'm facing a bit of an uphill struggle to get employed, but all I'll get out of most Employment Services Providers is more of the same old song. Nothing acknowledging that maybe there is a bit of structural prejudice out there which is going to make things harder. No admitting that maybe trying to put someone who has a resume full of technical support work forward for cleaning positions or casual retail sales, or (for crying out loud) telling them to submit their resume to Woolies might just result in yet another blasted knock-back ("over qualified").

Basically, the main hope of most of these firms is that if one of their "clients" gets employed (through sheer luck or a minor economic uptick) they're going to be able to claim it as a "success" on their stats. Either that or they'll just give up.

Coherent sensible sustainable policies are of great importance for transition such as welfare to work.

Have a look at the green economy transition.

Australia is well positioned to take advantage of growth in demand for lower emissions goods and services, particularly in the renewable energy sector and the management of natural resources, owing to a relative abundance of solar radiation and wind resources, as well as strong traditions in land and water management systems.

Skilling people for jobs does have it's challenges...

and achieving human capital is the responsibilty of the individual as well.

Education and training does take time... a matter of task discipline and education, training and learn on the job time.

MANY PROBLEMS LIKE THIS WOULD BE SOLVED If we could have a real comprehensive debate in the media with all facts and factors there would be a chance to find support for managing this problem but can we get past the sections of our community who wield the power and influence whne it shold be our elected governments.

It appears to me tabloid media instead of delivering to our people real facts and all factors influencing our economy, government policy outcomes it seem to promote division, anxst and confusion or ambiguity brought about by enless opinionated opinion fests.

Governments seem to be constantly justifying and reduced to now (24hr cycle) politics instead of focusing on the long term policies. This does advantage oppositions and enabling the media to fill up the 24 x 7 cycle but is a great disadvantage to our country and people.

If you feel this is a politic bias it is not no matter what flavour government gets in it will be no different. We need to have a reliable source of information not trivalised but detailed. In the past governments with the support of responsible oppostions were able to deliver many good outcomes for our country and peoples and still be true to their own ideologies while fighting to be voted in.

With all due respect to the author, it seems to me that the problem is not with ESPs per se, but the bureaucratic nature of the HR industry, which has lead to credentialism becoming a scourge. Because HR staff rarely have any understanding of the actual work done by the people they employ, they rely entirely on paper credentials, which often have only a tenuous link to the requirements of the job, or could be easily and cheaply obtained by an incumbent once given the job.

At the beginning of last year I closed my business and as a result was placed in the position of trying to find work. I wasn't registered with Centrelink, so I wasn't compelled to use an ESP.

In a month I applied for around 20 jobs. Of those, about half were handled by corporate HR and the rest were directly to business decision makers. I was not offered any interviews by HR departments and I only received one notification that my application had been rejected.

On the other hand, I was offered an interview by every single one of the decision-makers/business owners and offered a job by 3 of them. I'm still working in the job I accepted, albeit on compo with a slightly busted ankle at the moment.

The simple difference is that those people wanted someone who could actually do the job they wanted done, they weren't simply filling in a tick-sheet.

Get rid of the know-nothing time wasters and paper shufflers, wherever they are.

While the average figures show employment outcomes that politicians can spin into positive media stories, there are other aspects of Australia's employment outcomes that show our nation in a particularly poor light.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that labour force participation in 2009 is 56% for indigenous Australians and 54% for people with a disability.
For people with autism, labour force participation is 34% (see http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/4428.0main+features72009). These are abysmal outcomes.
Australia's disability unemployment and poverty rates are a national disgrace (see http://a4.org.au/a4/node/426).
So far, the Government has been unresponsive on these matters (see http://a4.org.au/a4/node/521). Will they be any more responsive with their current "consultation"?

Bring on an investigation into churning. In my opinion, it has enabled politicians to regularly claim that thousands of "new-full-time-jobs" have been created when many are short-term positions that have been recycled through the system numerous times. Such opportunism might be good for public-confidence, but failure to acknowledge job-shortage not only compounds the problem, but also feeds the myth-of-opportunity-for-all and deepens community-resentment towards jobless people.

I would also be interested to know how "improving human-capital through education and training" can provide many pratical outcomes for people who "have a work history in low end jobs or who have been out of the workforce for a long period". It seems to me that a desire to create a "high-skills-high-wage-economy" is at odds with the rapid rate-of-change associated with the new Global Industrial Marketplace within which we all now compete. My own experience of education and training programs available to low-skilled-long-term-unemployed-people leaves me with serious doubts that many will benefit in the long-term, largely owing to the likely imbalance between graduates and vacancies in the specific fields involved.

I am also concerned regarding mention in the article of a public consultative process based on the paper "Employment Services: Building on Success". The article describes the terms of reference as "narrowly focused on marginal improvements to the present 'successful' system". I suspect that this consultative process will be as narrow as other welfare-related-discussions have been in recent years, and drive many jobless people into the same dead-end that I have been stuck in for a long time.