Pros
Great opportunity to work directly with the community and decent pay for entry level position. If you can hack it in this industry, you will have so many transferable skills- crisis dw escalation, conflict management, admin, KPIs, reverse marketing, cross cultural communication, problem solving, advocacy etc. Working directly with the community is very rewarding, you meet so many people and you have access to make changes by spending money on courses, counselling, work clothes which can make a difference even if it’s small. If you get a good manager who believes in their mission of actually helping people it’s a godsend
Cons
Like with an employment provider, your experience is highly linked to your team and management- there’s a high risk of burnout too so even if you have a good team expect an extremely high turnover. Within the one year I was there, the entire team had changed. It’s very common for people to be racist and ableist despite working with these communities- people will say “why cant they just get a job/work harder” when it’s pretty clear that if people are long term unemployed, there’s always going to be some visible and invisible barriers, people aren’t just “lazy”. An employment specialist said that Indigenous cultural practices needed to be “bred out” to get a job and everyone nodded along like it was a normal thing to say. It’s the nature of the industry and KPIs that youre expected to place people into work as soon as possible so you don’t really have much time to work with participants to address barriers. Caseloads of over 100 participants is a lot and can be hard to keep up with. The software and systems of wise specifically is pretty outdated and constantly crashes and lags. For some areas where other providers may have a whole team, youre expected to either do yourself or refer to one person (normally based in over east) who will be in charge of the whole country/company for that area and get back to you in a passive aggressive email that takes 1-2 business days (no judgement, I’d probably be the same or worse if I was the 1 person in that department).