Support Needs Assessors - Contracts

Question

Mr McNaughton: To get ready for the go live in April next year, we need to build a very capable workforce so that we can do two or three things. One is to do the testing that Mr Verlin talked about. We want to do somewhere in the vicinity of 5,000 to 10,000 simulation tests in the back half of this calendar year. We will then do more tests after the Christmas period. Then we'll start a pipeline of getting participants ready for go live in April. You need a fairly sizeable workforce for the numbers. We're talking hundreds and hundreds of trained, accredited, skilled support needs assessors ready to go for April. This is building our workforce. Of that group we're recruiting for that period of time, we expect many will be offered additional contracts, and we will continue to work with recruitment providers to help us source staff for that too. Senator STEELE-JOHN: Just to help me understand, given your goal of building that workforce capacity, why such a short contract? Mr McNaughton: It's largely due to some contractual issues that we have with the recruitment providers that we're working with at the moment. We're hoping to quickly go back out to market in the near future offer much longer contracts, potentially two years or beyond if we can. Senator STEELE-JOHN: That's intriguing. What are the contract issues you're referring to? Mr McNaughton: I might be out of my swim lane here shortly, so I might take that on notice and come back to you around that. We are having some limitations around what we could do with the current recruitment contracts that we had in the agency, and we need to go back to market to tender for recruitment providers. Senator STEELE-JOHN: If you could, on notice, come back to me with what those issues are, that would be really useful.

Answer

Please see attached answer.

Documents

• Question with answer (PDF) (opens in a new tab)
• NDIA SQ26-000164.pdf (opens in a new tab)