Sean and APM Employment Services transcript

Sean: My name is Sean. I'm 32. I moved to South Australia about 10 years ago, I'm originally from the Gold Coast and I love animals. I had been diagnosed with Crohn's disease in 2016, I think it was. With Crohn's, you feel like you're constantly tethered to a bathroom. It causes great anxiety for a lot of people. Trying to hold down any type of work in general was quite difficult. So I had to really make it clear to who I was employed by at the time, “This is how my Crohn's works”, "This is what's involved, and if I've got to go to a toilet, I don't have a choice."

Amelia: So Sean came to us, and he was working at another employer. He wasn't happy there, so we aimed on transitioning him to an employer that suited his needs.

Sean: They ask you right from the beginning, “What are you interested in doing?”, “What fields do you want to go into?”. APM are great for that. They just help go through a list, of making sure everything that they look for is going to suit what you are after. APM made it very easy for me to approach that because they were like, "Give us your information. We'll help you put a resume together.” “We'll help you find a job.” That first step was the hardest I think, was getting that resume together, and then once I had that resume together, everything kind of just started clicking and falling into place for me.

Amelia: We started to approach some local employers, and were fortunate enough to gain a vacancy at SA Design and Print. Sean had done a diploma in graphic design. It was in an area we thought that he would want to work in, and Geoff also had an understanding of the struggles that Sean was facing in a day to day.

Sean: The job worked perfectly for me, because it played more towards what I was capable of doing and something that I was trained to do. And APM knew that this would be a perfect fit for me because of the barriers I had and the fact that I was going to be close to a bathroom and things like that all played into making such a good place for me to work in.

Geoff: In the small country area here finding suitable staff, suitably qualified staff is always an issue, and it's not only in the print industry, it's right across the board, and then to have someone come into town that had the skillset that we were specifically looking for was just ironic, and hence the reason he’s just made such a significant benefit to the business and he’s just picked it up so quick. It’s been wonderful.

Sean: For anybody who has a medical condition or a disability, or anything that can basically act as a barrier for them entering the workforce, APM will make that transition so much easier, you know, so much easier. And I would recommend it to anybody. APM were there in a proverbial way, holding my hand to say “Hey, look, we're here. You're not doing this alone. You're doing it together with us”. And having that support was amazing.