As Refugee Week comes to an end, Opal HealthCare is celebrating the refugee students that completed professional internships with them.
Opal HealthCare and CareerSeekers partnered to provide professional 12-week internships to undertake while completing university studies.
Since the program began in 2019, Opal HealthCare has welcomed 18 students from Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, South Sudan, India and Ukraine.
Students can be enrolled in a field of study that allows them to gain experience in a home office role to support Opal HealthCare’s care communities. The program has included interns completing various degrees including commerce, psychology, information technology and accounting.
The paid internships take place at Opal HealthCare’s Sydney home office and provide the students with an opportunity to develop and apply their skills, bring unique perspectives and gain experience in aged care.
Director of people and culture Yolande Nealon told Australian Ageing Agenda that several of the interns are now employed in permanent roles at Opal HealthCare.
Yolande Nealon (supplied)
“Enabling our interns to gain confidence, apply their existing skills and develop new ones, while undertaking meaningful work that makes a real difference in communities, has been incredibly rewarding,” she told AAA.
For Ali, an Irani-born Afghani refugee, it was difficult to find work in the cyber security market upon arriving in Australia in 2017. He had started a degree in Iran and turned to construction and manufacturing jobs while continuing his studies at the University of Technology in Sydney.
A fellow Afghani then told him about CareerSeekers and he secured an internship with Opal HealthCare.
“Working in a frontline support role gave me the communication skills I needed to progress,” he said. “And I loved it. It’s beautiful helping people. It inspired me to keep learning, and it helped [me] grow as a person, and that led me to receiving an offer of full-time employment as an applications support analyst.”
Opal HealthCare has committed to providing another five internships a year for the next three years as part of its partnership with CareerSeekers.
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