Coffey takes farmhands to the lab, to help take paddocks to highways

Coffey Information is giving unemployed country kids a shot at a solid career in testing and analysis.
Field manager at Coffey Information Steve Chandler, said major highway construction projects cutting through regional areas like Port Macquarie and Taree, provided the perfect opportunity to engage and train locals.
Many of the young people seeking work with Coffey Information had taken a dramatic turn in their career paths, according to Chandler.
One was trying to get into the armed forces, one wanted to be a professional musician and one was working on dads farm, he said. We are offering them a chance to do something completely different and to lay the foundations for a career in testing and analysis.
When you have a major project, you will have a staff of around 30 people so it creates employment opportunities in that area that ordinarily wouldnt be available, he said. If you look at where the Coopernook bypass road is going, its in between two fairly substantial regional centres of Taree and Port Macquarie. Theres a lot of farmland in between and in that region unemployment is one of the highest in Australia. A project like this gives local kids opportunities to get involved in something that they otherwise wouldnt have a chance to do.
Chandler said testing encompassed a broad range of field and lab-based soil and rock sampling and was a vital part of any major infrastructure or mining project. He added Coffey Information was bringing in skilled workers to provide high level training to new recruits.
We have about a 50-50 mix of experienced technicians from elsewhere in Coffey and local people we have trained up specially, he said. We are about to do another recruitment drive and have around 15 or more local people by the end of the year. Theres probably going to be another six to 10 projects between Brisbane and Port Macquarie over the next 10 years so there will be good opportunities.
He said the advantage in providing career opportunities and creating a skilled local workforce was not entirely a one-way street; Coffey Information and the industry as a whole also benefited.
Its good for industry in that at the moment there is definitely a skills shortage in Australia and people with any sort of testing expertise are really hard to come by, he said. As a benefit to the industry you would hope that you might get a number of new workers who will move into this as a career. We hope that they will stay.
This is a really good opportunity for them and they seem to really enjoy it. Of the 10 we took on initially, all are still with us and proving themselves to be valuable employees.
He said a low starting wage in testing and analysis was still a very competitive wage compared with other industries and part of the appeal of the jobs offered by Coffey was the capacity to earn a good income in an area where serious career paths could otherwise be quite limited. But it was also simply a great job.
The new recruits are more likely to stay with this career in the longer term when there is major project work available, as there is at the moment. There are good opportunities to earn more through overtime and project allowances, he said, but they also like the work itself. Its a pretty good job. Theres a good balance of inside and outside work and its fulfilling because you see something go from a paddock to a completed highway.
Chandler said the new testers would be trained literally from the ground up.
We can take them with no experience at all, he said. We run a week long training course which is a basic introduction to soils testing and lab testing 101. We teach the fundamentals and at the end of the week they are capable of testing a sample. We are recruiting in waves to give the new trainees time to get up to speed before the next wave arrives.
In about two months well do it again. We are about to set up in Ballina as well. This is slightly different as its closer to the Gold Coast and Brisbane and there will be more skilled people about. But well try to get at least half of the work force out of the local community so its a really great time for new people to be getting into the industry.