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Sandra Smith, a Christchurch woman, has applied for 20 jobs in the elderly and disabled care sector in the past three months, but has so far been unsuccessful.
Sandra Smith’s unsuccessful job search in the elderly and disabled care sector has left her so demoralized that she sometimes wonders if she made the right decision to return to New Zealand.
After 13 years of living and working in Australia, the 58-year-old Christchurch woman returned home three months ago to seek refuge from the coronavirus pandemic.
He also sought to find employment in a field he is passionate about and has worked in on and off for the past 10 years.
But instead, Smith receives the job search benefit, a weekly welfare payment that helps people financially until they find work. She has applied for 20 positions in Christchurch in the care sector for the elderly and disabled, including entry-level positions, but continues to be rejected.
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“Every job I applied for has turned me down,” Smith said.
“You don’t even get news from some of them. They don’t have the courtesy to contact you. “
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About a quarter of the 25,000 caregivers in the elderly care sector are migrant workers.
She said that she knew other people in the same situation as her.
Given how difficult it has been to find employment, Smith said she was surprised and “insulted” to see that an elderly or disabled caregiver was on a list of 633 jobs migrant workers had been granted work visas for essential skills since they closed. New Zealand borders in March.
“It is very degrading and degrading. It makes you feel like you are a waste of space. “
He said he wondered if he still belonged to New Zealand.
While he had no formal qualifications, all the job postings he applied for said that if a candidate did not have the necessary qualifications, it did not matter as the selected candidates would be helped to obtain them on the job.
He was also charged with obtaining the necessary qualifications.
Essential Skills Work Visas are employer assisted, which means that the visa is tied to an advertised role and in order to obtain a visa, employers must provide evidence that genuine attempts have been made to hire a New Zealander and that New Zealand Immigration must be satisfied that, at the time the application was evaluated, there were no New Zealanders available to perform the work.
Smith said Immigration NZ needed to look up people with job search benefits and see what skills they had and what jobs they were looking for.
“They need to ask the questions, they don’t just need to follow what the employers say.”
Smith said an organization he applied for a job with told him he had too much experience for the position.
She said that she was currently studying a government-funded health and wellness course to become a certified caregiver. But now he wonders if he should continue studying if there is not going to be a job at the end.
“If I get these qualifications and I can’t get a job in this sector, I will be really disappointed.”
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New Zealand Aged Care Association CEO Simon Wallace says New Zealanders make up 75 percent of his workforce.
Simon Wallace, executive director of the New Zealand Senior Care Association, said there were about 35,000 workers in the senior care sector.
Of those 25,000 were caregivers, about a quarter of whom were migrant workers, and about 5,000 were registered nurses.
In early April, the sector obtained a government waiver for migrant workers to receive a 12-month extension for their essential skills work visas, he said.
“We were able to provide evidence at the time that we had a caregiver shortage.”
That stabilized the caregiver workforce because it allowed the sector to retain people it would otherwise lose when their visa expired, and they had to return to their home country.
“We could see a problem was looming and we were going to lose several thousand of our caregivers who had to return to their home country. At the time, there were no New Zealanders to do the papers. “
He said there were also regional variations in demand for labor, for example caregivers were more in need in Auckland than in Christchurch.
Currently, there are no migrant caregivers entering through the border, he said. The only critical health worker the sector was crossing the border were internationally qualified nurses, although very few.
The caregiver’s situation was evolving, he said.
“Next year we will lose the migrants who had their one-year extension and again we will have the challenge of finding New Zealanders to play the roles.”
