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How Australia can help international students find jobs after graduation

Vondra Tay

Mon Oct 03 2016

Lovely office worker with a bright smile.

INTERNATIONAL students looking to work in Australia may benefit from a new report that has been welcomed by the country’s peak body for employment and recruitment. Vondra Tay has the story.

Australia’s peak body for employment and recruitment services, the Recruitment & Consulting Services Association (RCSA), has embraced a new report that wishes to create change in the country’s employment practices. But what does this mean for international students?

The report, produced by the World Employment Confederation and titled The Future of Work, calls for numerous policy changes to better enable those looking for work in the country.

Some of the policy changes and improvements include:

  • Creating an enabling environment for companies to allow maximum opportunities to hire as many people as possible
  • Fostering more flexible and destandardised working conditions that will help benefit women, people with disability and ethnic minorities
  • Connecting the worlds of education and business together by providing more pathways for young people to transition between informal work and formal work
  • Less restrictions and more opportunities for entrepreneurship to encourage new businesses and adaptable forms of work in different industries
  • Encouraged cooperation between public and private employment services to help people looking for jobs opportunities more efficiently.

The perspectives and unique experiences that international students can bring to the Australian workforce would therefore align with some of the paper’s requests. Companies and policymakers can help create more opportunities to diversify their workforce and give young people a chance at better positioning themselves for work.

Moreover, the paper also acknowledges that today’s workforce has “never been so diverse and educated”, and asks companies and Government to assist in re-evaluating our attitudes on what it means to have a meaningful job. The report asks policy makers to consider that individuals are now simply looking for jobs that work for them and not the other way around.

Commenting on the Future of Work Whitepaper, CEO of the RCSA Charles Cameron, noted that it was completely out of touch in modern Australia to consider “flexible and part-time work [as] an inferior form of work”.

Currently, the Australian labour market ranks fifth on the World Employment Confederation’s Smart Regulation Index – 2016, which ranks countries that employ smart labour market regulation along with job creation, participation and inclusion in the workforce and record lower levels of youth unemployment.

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