Employment preparation workshops run by Multicultural Learning and Support Services (MCLaSS) Employment Support team are proving popular with unskilled refugee and migrant jobseekers with low level of English.
The workshops address one of the most frustrating barriers to successfully getting and keeping a job, namely, not knowing and understanding New Zealand employment rights and responsibilities and social welfare policies.
The workshops have been developed to support the one-to-one coaching and brokering service offered by MCLaSS to refugee and migrant jobseekers.
A number of refugees and migrants with good English language skills provided first language support to help others understand the information provided by each speaker at a series of workshops conducted recently.
The speakers included employers and successful jobseekers, who narrated their experiences of employment and job interviews.
The jobseekers discussed some of the differences they have discovered between employment expectations in New Zealand and countries from which they arrived.
In some cultures, for example, it is not appropriate for a female to shake hands with a male, or for a jobseeker to maintain eye contact with an employer.
Such conduct is common, if not expected, in many New Zealand workplaces.
Entitlements such as parental, sick and bereavement leave are also foreign concepts for people from some countries.
Source: Multicultural Learning and Support Services
