Vantaggi
Obtain very good customer service skills for your CV
Svantaggi
Where do I start? This job used to be done in house by DHS and was classified as APS Level 4. Sadly, because paying fair wages and working conditions wasn't inline with "small government" the Liberals decided to outsource all of these call centre jobs to private companies who weren't bound to paying their workers fair wages and could "compete" to provide the best service (in other words race each other to the bottom by paying their workers as little as possible). In this job, you're payed $23 an hour to deal with some very serious situations for the end customers that can require you to undertake a huge amount of fast and 100% accurate information retrieval, navigating massive procedural documents. If you mess up, you could really screw an end customer over. Customers are also often rude and abusive or extremely difficult to understand. All the while you're KPIs are micro-monitored. You don't get payed penalty rates even if you have to start work at 6am. The company play up bonuses and open book management as if its some beautiful fair system with juicy rewards for doing your job but in reality you'll still only receive peanuts from them. The enterprise agreement also dates back to 2014 which is not good to say the least. The 7 (now 5) weeks of training is also a) mind-numbingly boring and b) does not prepare you for 90% of the work you actually end up doing - a lot of which is coding that the training barely touches on. For me this meant it took several months to even be somewhat competent at the job. This is horrible when you have some poor person on the phone for 3 and a half hours because you've got no clue what to do and there isn't enough support staff available. Staff are also apathetic and some of the other girls in my team were extremely toxic and catty. This job destroyed my mental health. By the end I just dreaded going into that place every morning and quitting was the best thing I ever did, even if I'm still looking for work 3 weeks later. As a a FYI: A similar job exists that is still in-house with DHS and is technically lower down on the hierarchy (APS Level 3) yet their workers are payed around $37 an hour and have much fairer conditions thanks to strong CPSU membership.