Earlier this year we surveyed a number of you to get more understanding of your needs and how you felt the Disability Employment Services (DES) Program through The Salvation Army Employment Plus (EPlus) was serving you.
Pleasingly – when asking survey participants how much they would recommend our service, the average score was an eight out of ten. We know we’re not perfect – no one is – but we are proud that the majority saw value in our support. We asked you how accessible you found our services, with respondents giving us a score of seven out of ten. Naturally, we are always open to more detailed feedback as to how we can make our services more available to our DES job seekers. So please share ideas with your job coach.
We did note a 14% drop in confidence from participants looking to find work in the next three months. However, 14% of respondents now felt they would find the right work within a 6-12 month period. Remember: we’re happy to provide ongoing support, should it take a little longer to find you the right role.
It was interesting to find that half of the surveyed respondents were referred to Employment Plus by Centrelink, while 30% elected us due to the breadth of support services we provide. The remainder were influenced by family and proximity to our offices. Pleasingly, 45% of respondents felt they were receiving better support since moving to our service, with around the same number still evaluating the situation.
We were interested to know just how many of our DES job seekers are supported by NDIS, with 22% of survey respondents saying they were registered. It is worth considering if you are eligible for this extra free support via your NDIS plan. But if you’re not, make sure you talk to your job coach to maximise the ways we can help you – you may be surprised by what we can offer.
We also wanted to know what kind of jobs people were looking for, with Healthcare and Social Assistance (18%), Administration and Support (9%), Retail (6%) and Manufacturing (5%) being the most popular vocations. Of course, we have a much wider selection of jobs and training opportunities on offer so please check out our current vacancies here.
The key motivators for finding work in 2024 were financial gain (76%) independence (56%), and more security (51%). The latter almost doubled from our 2022 survey reflecting our challenging economy.
Money isn’t the only thing that was important to our survey respondents. Interestingly, after almost five years of increased isolation (off the back of the pandemic), feeling part of a community or meeting new people jumped from 25% and 22%, respectively, to both polling at 33%– reflecting people’s ongoing desire for human connection.
Despite all this good news, we also learned that we had some areas to work on – particularly around understanding, or working with, a specific individual’s disability circumstances.
The percentage of participants who felt EPlus understood their specific circumstance dropped slightly from 86% in 2023 to 80% in 2024. There was also a slight decrease in the number of participants who felt EPlus helped them get job-ready – moving down an affirmative of almost 79% to 76%.
We're proud to hear that DES participants still feel that we help them to understand their obligations as a job seeker receiving support (92%). We also understand that for many of our participants, living with an invisible condition e.g., anxiety or depression is common, with 86% saying ‘yes’. Based on this information and your written responses to the survey identified four areas of improvement to our service.
These include:
- creating highly individualised plans for each participant.
- improving our understanding of what it is like to live with disabilities (a broad range).
- creating more networking events where we can provide participants direct access to a number of employers and job opportunities.
- Helping our participants with their obligations for NDIS and other applications.
If you have any other feedback you would like to share, please email marketing.eplus@salvationarmy.org.au.