My name is Nat Dunbar. I'm the Outreach Counsellor here at Southwest Human Resources and I've been in this job for about 3 months. The title, the Outreach Counsellor position is mostly helping people get I guess educated in the training and the employment, well basically help them get a career path in finding employment or in higher education levels and training. So my position is basically to help them do resume writing, job skills, cover letters, stuff like that.

My days usually entail doing intake, talking a lot on the telephone, filling out registration forms for training and programming and basically just helping the other Employment Officer's put together programs that we can send to clientele.

The process we take them through, is we probably, what we do is we sit down with the client and I'll determine how the client needs help just through asking them to tell me a little bit about themselves. And while they're going through this I'll take notes and kind of determine what they want either in employment or in training as far as education goes. If it's in education then what we do is we sit down and we try and build a plan for them. If it's something he wants to get into in business, well then we try to set him up through our business administration programs that we have through our office. And if it has to do with employment, then what I do is I take their resumes and try to fit them in with the jobs that come in through other agencies throughout the city.

Some days are nine to five; some days are seven till ten at night time I would say. I could pretty well be working from the time I get up to the time I go to bed to try to help the people just enhance their level of education and stuff like that.

The most challenging aspect of my job would be, I would say, not being able to help everybody, everybody that comes through our office, you know. Because I have a genuine concern for what people are going through nowadays and I've lived it myself. I kind of wish that I had more, I guess more just genuine access. I guess you could say access to different kinds of programs that I could send our people to. Because I'd have to say about ninety percent of the people come through our office for education and training.

The most satisfying part would be when I do my follow-ups at the end of the month and stuff like that. Like when I send my resumes out to my contact people and when I talk to the people that I've sent resumes out for and they tell me they got a job out of it. Or if my students come in to me and say look you know, I've got my grade ten now and these are people that have come in with grade fives. You know, that's probably my most, I would say I feel the best after that. You know, that's how I feel as far as, I feel satisfied like I've done my job when my students come in and tell me that "Yes you know, I became my grade ten out of my ABE program." or "I'd got this job."

There is a fair return on the job I do here because once you start helping people it kind of grows on you and you kind of want to do it. And I think because a lot of the jobs that come along in this day and age are people jobs. If you can talk to people and actually be able to problem solve with people and stuff like that, I think that's a big asset.

My education is a certificate in Business Administration. I have some Desktop Publishing experience and basically just being a people person and having the Counselling experience has a lot to do with it. The most important is the people skills in my aspect of my job because I deal with so many issues and deal with different people all the time.

Teamwork skills are important because we deal with so many different issues. A lot of different, like people in the office are more educated in certain areas. So it's nice to have, to be able to go back and get that feedback from certain employees in the office and be able to help my clients that way.

To keep a positive attitude in this job is probably, it ranges between difficult I guess and it starts getting easier and easier. Positive attitude is probably most important in this job because of the people that we see, the clientele that we see. Some of them come in and they're kind of…they kind of got…they're down because they can't find employment or they can't get into training, and that's part of my job is to boost their attitude a little bit and show them that there is some opportunities out there for them.

It's very important to adapt to change I think because of the wide variety of people that come in from youth to adults to actually elderly people coming in for different kinds of advice.

Get an education, get some counselling skills, have people skills because this is one of the main areas that you probably have to have in the outreach counselling position is you've got to be able to talk to people and reason with people. I would think to be informative of the Labour Market. You definitely have to know what's out there as far as jobs and stuff like that, just so that you can assist your clients. And basically just be a professional, show the people that you care and you're out there to do the work for them.