By Adam Coleman

The Local Government and Shires Association (LGSA) of New South Wales and MyCareer.com.au have joined forces to create an online job site that specifically promotes local government positions.

“The reason we are doing this is because there wasn’t an easy way to specifically look for local government jobs,” LGSA design and development co-ordinator, Diana Mounter told governmentnews.com.au.

The LGSA job site will work in conjunction with another site under development – Careers in Local Government, which aims to help councils tackle skills shortages.

[Careers in Local Government] is in its early stages at the moment. We have a basic site up, which has a number of profiles of young people in local government and there is a bit more advice for councils of how to encourage staff into local government jobs.

“A lot of young people wouldn’t be aware of the variety of careers that there are in local government.”

The LGSA will attempt to encourage councils to utilise both sites.

“Hopefully we will be able to encourage councils to use that service more because it will be displayed on our site,” Ms Mounter says.

“It’s working from both angles really, trying to give people reasons to go into local government and the also the other side helping councils encourage people to work in local government.

We are basically streaming the content from MyCareer and just making it easy for people to directly go and look for jobs in local government.”

According to Shires Association of NSW president Col Sullivan, the job search site will not only “make it easier to find council jobs, but it will attract skilled workers to the sector. This is important because local government is facing a skills shortage in some fields, and is always looking for talented staff”.

Job seekers will have access to MyCareer tools like RSS job feeds and Job Alerts, and can be notified every hour of new local government positions being posted.

“There are great opportunities in local government with about 50,000 people directly employed by the sector in NSW,” Cr Sullivan says.

“We encourage people to log on and take a look.”

While it would seem to make sense to expand the job search site to include all states, at this stage the focus is on NSW.

Local government jobs will be accessible through the NSW LGSA website in early December.