Community members keen to relaunch their careers are armed with more knowledge thanks to free pop-up sessions.
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The reboot, refresh, relaunch career pop-ups provided the opportunity for those who found themselves out of work, or whose work has reduced or been impacted by COVID-19, to speak with advisers to point them in the right direction for assistance.
Experts from employment, personal and professional development services were on hand to help at career pop-up sessions at Port Macquarie, Wauchope and Laurieton on August 4, 5 and 6 respectively.
Port Macquarie-Hastings Council acting director Liesa Davies said people booked in and also dropped in for advice.
"We know people have been heavily impacted by COVID, not just in our community as employees, but also our local businesses," she said.
"The environment continues to be uncertain so this shows people are thinking about the future.
"Not all of them are necessarily impacted now but I think people recognise they still could be as well."
Community members sought a range of advice from how to upskill or transition into a new career to tips about starting a new business.
Existing businesses looked for support as well.
The career pop-up sessions were an initiative of the COVID-19 Recovery Working Group.
"Clearly whilst we've had JobKeeper and JobSeeker providing some support to people, it was every evident even a couple of months ago that this [pandemic] could have some very dire circumstances for some of our community in terms of employment," Ms Davies said.
"Whilst we have a raft of services available locally for the unemployed, and they do great work, what we were seeing with COVID was people who probably thought 12 months ago they had a very stable career and had great skills, suddenly had the potential to become unemployed.
"Some of the feedback received was that those people hadn't been out of work before, they didn't know where to look, who to connect with or what their options might be."
That's when the career pop-ups played their part.
The council also has information on its website to support the business community and people seeking training and employment support.
Ms Davies recognised the breadth of expert support for the career pop-up sessions and the organisations which contributed to the resources on the council website.
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