TAFE FUNDING TO BE USED FOR SKILLS AND EMPLOYMENT CENTRES Goulburn Ovens Institute of TAFE welcomed a $1 million funding announcement from the Victorian Government yesterday. The funding will be used for skills and employment centres at the Shepparton and Wangaratta TAFE campuses. State Member for Northern Victoria Jaclyn Symes said the government had committed $15 million to create skills and employment centres in the state. She said $7 million of that funding was going to rural and regional areas and $1 million was for Shepparton and Wangaratta. The new hubs will be the first points of call for students looking to start training, workers needing to re-skill, unemployed workers needing support for re-training and work placement, and for employers. Ms Symes said the funding was also a great opportunity for passionate people to get together and talk about local needs and what industry wanted. The institutes chief executive Paul Culpan said for many it was difficult to navigate the current employment system. Mr Culpan said the skills and job centre would give people a designated area to go to and gain information and help if they had been made redundant or if they had finished school but were not sure what to do next. Its about making it easier for people to navigate the system, he said. The institutes strategy and commercial development executive manager Ken McLennan said there would be a core capability house at each of the skills and employment centres. We need to be able to undertake skills assessments as people come through, so we really want to know what peoples capabilities are . . . and look at career options for them, he said. Well be putting them through what we call a career voyager program, which is really looking at where their career preferences are and then looking at the skills gaps and how we might fill those. He said the skills and job centre would also create more jobs at the institutes Shepparton campus. Well be recruiting probably five or six new staff to support the project because we dont have some of those capabilities in-house already, he said. Mr McLennan said at the moment there were a lot of job search agencies and networks. Continued on page 6 Boost for TAFE From page 1 What we hope to do and we still have to have a lot of discussion is to bring all those interested parties together and try to develop that end-to-end service for job seekers, Mr McLennan said. Weve got a really big youth unemployment issue in the region biggest youth unemployment in the state but this is also about retrenched workers, mature-age workers, people who might need to re-skill, really the whole range of people looking for jobs. The Shepparton skills and job centre will be based at the TAFE campus in Corio St. The $1 million will go into the signage and just changing some of the walls and things like that, Mr Culpan said. Thats what well be doing over the next couple of months to get that all sorted. Caption Text: State Member for Northern Victoria Jaclyn Symes Good news: Goulburn Ovens Institute of TAFE chief executive Paul Culpan, State Member for Northern Victoria Jaclyn Symes and GOTAFE chairman Michael Tehan were happy with $1 million funding announcement.