Welcome to the
Annual Disability Employment Services Conference
Welcome to the Annual Disability Employment Services Conference presented by Disability Employment Australia. This year’s event will be from Wednesday 8th August to Thursday 9th August 2012 at the Grand Hyatt Melbourne.
The Disability Employment Services Conference has the tradition of being an important annual event for disability employment professionals and leaders. As part of its ongoing commitment to industry development and growth, Disability Employment Australia aims to provide delegates with opportunities to think, question and respond to a range of critical industry issues in ways that are meaningful to their organisations, jobseekers with disability and the industry more broadly.
This year we will again be providing standalone workshops the day prior to the conference for members, to allow engagement with key speakers on critical issues. These will occur on the afternoon of the 7th of August 2012.
Who should attend?
Anyone with an interest in employment assistance for people with disability including: management and staff of the Disability Employment Services (Disability Management Support and Employment Support Services); Job Services Australia providers; advocates; training organisations; policy makers; researchers; employers and their representatives.
About The Conference
Our annual Disability Employment Services Conference falls at what will be a critical time for the sector in 2012. We will be post-tender, and this conference will provide an excellent opportunity to regroup, debrief, and map out our strategy moving forward.
We will be offering a multi-level program. Sessions will cater to the Board/CEO level, exploring ‘running the business’, what is ahead for NGO reforms and government policy changes. We will look to contemporary operational management and workforce planning, as well as offer an array of practitioner workshops, with an eye to better practice, emerging trends and target groups.
The itinerary will maintain our focus on the integrity of the program. Striking a balance that puts the person with disability at the centre of the process is essential, and we will look to successful international models in the UK for evidence-based best practice that both maintains integrity and ‘plays the game’.
We will also look to the DES sector for aspirational examples of evidence-based best practice – both here and abroad. We invite you to submit proposals to present your best practice models and illustrate the evidence-base through case studies to the rest of the sector.
And finally, as we will all have given the 2012 tender, (in which ever shape it eventuates) everything that we have, we will incorporate some much needed de-stress and relaxation into the conference. As part of this theme, we will provide mini-massages on site.