Beyond the resume: what Clean Start actually builds

A resume is the last thing we build

Most job readiness programs start with the resume. We finish with it.

That is not a stylistic choice. It is the whole point. A resume is a summary of what someone already understands about work, about themselves and about the place they are trying to enter. If you write it in week one, you are summarising nothing. By week seven, when our participants sit down to write theirs, they have something to say and the confidence to say it.

Clean Start is a ten session program for young people and newly arrived migrants who face real barriers to work. Some have never held a job in Australia. Some have held several and lost them without ever being told why. Some have a qualification from home that nobody here recognises and a story about work that nobody here has asked to hear. We built the program for them.

What the ten sessions actually cover

The program runs one session a week for ten weeks, in a small group of five to seven people. Small enough that nobody hides, large enough that participants learn from each other.

• Welcome and orientation. Who is in the room, what the program is, what it is not, and what each person wants out of it.
• The Australian workplace. How work is organised here, what employers expect, and the unwritten rules nobody explains.
• Getting work ready. Routines, reliability, presentation and the practical foundations that come before any job.
• Workplace communication. Speaking up, asking questions, taking instruction, handling disagreement.
• Work health and safety. Rights and responsibilities on site, and how to say no to something unsafe.
• Mandatory requirements and financial literacy. Tax file numbers, superannuation, reading a payslip, leave entitlements and what fair work actually means.
• Resume and CV. Built from everything above, not from a template.
• Cover letters. Short, specific and honest.
• Interview skills and mock interviews. Practised with real questions, real feedback and more than one go.
• Job matching and networking. Connecting each participant to the opportunities that fit what they can offer.

Every session is interactive. Nobody sits through a slide deck for two hours. People practise, get it wrong, and try again in a room where that is safe.

Why real worksites matter

Talking about work is not the same as seeing it. Where a cohort is ready for it, we take participants onto real worksites through our partner employers and through Dirt Busters Co., the cleaning and property maintenance business that sits alongside Sankofa.

A worksite visit does something a classroom cannot. It shows what a shift actually looks like, what the supervisor sounds like, what the pace is, and what the expectations are before anyone is under pressure to perform. For a young person who has never been inside a commercial workplace, that single exposure can take more fear out of the first day than ten sessions of theory.

It also means our employer partners get to meet participants before a resume ever lands in their inbox. Several of our placements have come from exactly that moment.

Life readiness, not just job readiness

The title of the program says employment and life readiness, and the second half is not decoration.

Session six is the one participants talk about most afterwards. Understanding tax, super and leave is not glamorous, but it is the difference between a person who can protect themselves at work and one who cannot. We have had participants discover they were underpaid for months because nobody had shown them how to read a payslip. We have had others who did not know superannuation existed. That knowledge belongs to everyone, and we treat it as a core outcome rather than an extra.

What we measure and report

We report against two things: employment outcomes and progression readiness.

Employment outcomes are the obvious ones. Did the participant move into paid work, further training or a work placement, and were they still there three months later. Across the cohorts we have run so far, roughly half of participants have moved into paid work. We are proud of that number and we are honest that it is not everyone.

Progression readiness is the measure for the other half. Not every participant is ready for a job at the end of ten weeks, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. So we assess, at the start and the end, where each person sits on the practical foundations: reliability, communication, documentation, confidence in an interview, understanding of their rights. A participant who arrives with none of those and leaves with most of them has made real progress, and our reporting says so.

Funders and partners get both numbers. That is how we think program reporting should work.

Who Clean Start is for

Clean Start runs in community settings and, in its school edition, with Year 10, 11 and 12 students. It is designed for young people facing barriers to work, culturally and linguistically diverse communities, Indigenous communities and newly arrived migrants. We have delivered it in partnership with Uniting Communities and with community organisations across Adelaide.

If you work with people who need this, or you are an employer who wants to meet them, we would like to talk. Email info@sankofa.com.au.

Rooted in the past. Built for the future.

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