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Creating careers inside First Nations companies

Two Aboriginal health service providers on the Eyre Peninsula have trained Indigenous staff to provide IT support with help from another First Nations company.

Jun 02, 2021, updated Nov 09, 2021
Jerome Newchurch from Ceduna supporting Yadu Aboriginal Corporation staff member with IT issue after undergoing training with New Future IT.

Jerome Newchurch from Ceduna supporting Yadu Aboriginal Corporation staff member with IT issue after undergoing training with New Future IT.

The Yadu Health Aboriginal Corporation in Ceduna and the Nunyara Aboriginal Health Service in Whyalla have chosen New Future IT from Darwin to train Indigenous workers to cover their internal IT needs.

New Future IT is an Aboriginal-owned and operated company that actively trains and employs young Aboriginal people who are looking for opportunities to work within the field of IT.

Dan Kyr, the Chief Technical Officer of Yadu Health and Nunyara Health, said New Future IT has tailored their new training pathway specifically for Aboriginal health services.

“The young Aboriginal people who are being trained up as IT technicians and are being supported and fostered by New Futures management, which is invaluable for our organisation seeing that the more regional you go, the more difficult it is to find good IT technicians,” Kyr said.

The initiative began with the trainees from Whyalla and Ceduna spending a week in the Northern Territory embedded in New Future IT’s operations.

“The trainees were able to be technicians and shadow technicians for an entire week, have an understanding of the environment of the help desk structure and their fellow peers,” Kyr said.

“It certainly has ensured that there is a greater chance of success for them in providing good service to us and also seeing out and completing their tertiary qualifications.”

New Future IT Co-Founder Jesse Leal said their initiative offers trainees a Certificate III in Information Technology and Digital Media provided by TAFE as well as real-world experience and networking and career opportunities.

“The training that these young people get arms them for a career anywhere in IT,” Leal said.“They can go to any commercial IT service provider and they have the recognised training and experience.”

Kyr said he has already seen a major improvement in the IT services provided to South Australian Aboriginal health services because of the training.

“The initial part of what we see is that the staff satisfaction of calling the help desk has had a major improvement over the previous service provider,” Kyr said.

Kyr said they picked New Future IT as the IT service provider for Yadu Health and Nunyara Health because of their “outstanding quality of work”.

“They are an Aboriginal owned and operated organisation which, being Aboriginal services ourselves, we found to be exceptionally rare,” Kyr said.

“More importantly, they understood the challenges of delivering effective and excellent IT services to remote and regional areas in South Australia.”

“I think the exciting thing is the way New Future IT is expanding as an Aboriginal organisation means it is creating jobs for Aboriginal people.”

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