Adobe Flash video
(1:43 minutes; 150KBps; 3.0MB FLV)
Transcript
The exterior of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare building can be seen with the title “Brendan, 2009 AIHW Graduate”.
This fades into Brendan talking in front of a soccer field with people playing in the background.
Brendan: I was after a change of career from my previous career, and a way of being introduced to the public service in a way that I would learn about the full gamut of things that I needed to know to transit into that sort of work. I was also interested in work that made use of my previous skills, and health statistics was a very natural fit as far as that was concerned.
Brendan: I’d say that the graduate program at AIHW is a lot more flexible than the programs you find in larger departments and agencies. It’s a lot more personal. You don’t feel like you’re just cannon fodder for a large department here, being squeezed in from one particular thing to another. You really get to be able to settle into a particular piece of work and to own it and to feel like you have some ownership of it.
Brendan: I work on a number of projects that are about coming up with more accurate estimates of indigenous mortality. These are quite important for Closing the gap targets and indicators that the Federal Government and the Council of Australian Governments have come up with.
Brendan: The graduate program here has been has been taking in quite a diverse number of people. So regardless of what your background is there’s been people in my year and other years that have come from all sorts of different academic backgrounds, previous work, different ages. So you shouldn’t feel that the work here is necessarily nothing to do with you, or that you wouldn’t be able to do it, people are very supportive here in helping you to take up new things you haven’t done before as well as utilizing the skills that you bring on board.