Australia, 25th February: A new program by Australia will focus on training immigrant engineers to help them get better adjusted in the Australian workforce.
The program will be launched by Navitas Workforce Solutions and Engineers Australia.
Training program for Australian immigrant engineers—Engineers are in great demand in Australia. However, due to lack of requisite training, only 50 percent of immigrant engineers coming to Australia get jobs in their related field, says Navitas, a private educational chain based in Australia.
The number of jobs bagged by native Australian engineers is said to be 63 percent, official figures by Engineers Australia show.
So, the new program will address this problem in immigrant engineers coming to live and work in Australia. In the year 2010, the number of immigrant engineers coming to Australia was stated to be around 9,000. And out of this, around 2,500 immigrant engineers came on Australian temporary visas.
According to general manager of Navitas Workforce Solutions, Catherine Chaffey, most of foreign-trained engineers coming to Australia face problems in knowing and making adjustments in Australian workforce and Australian workplace.
Details of the training program--The new Australian program focuses on skills for job-finding, communication, workplace culture as well as technical training. It will have a coursework of 80 hours after which there will be an internship period of 12 weeks.
This internship will be unpaid. Each batch of the program to be run every two months will include a maximum 20 participants.
The first batch of the program has already begun this January in Perth and had immigrant engineers from nations like India, the UK, Columbia, China, Pakistan, the Philippines and Iraq. Similar program will be launched in Brisbane depending on the demand for engineers, Ms. Chaffey.
The program is a modification of the professional year curriculum launched by Australian immigration department-DIAC (Department of Immigration and Citizenship) for providing training to overseas-trained engineering, IT and accounting graduates.
All immigrant engineers having valid Australia work permits or Australian permanent residency are eligible to apply for getting training under this program.
Already, more than 3,000 students have completed training by Navitas through professional year programs and around 70 percent of them have got jobs within a period of six months following training.