Useful general job-hunting web-sites
Two specialist web-sites
Jobs in Planning is a weekly e-mail bulletin dedicated to communicating employment opportunities in professional planning disciplines under such headings as Town/Urban, Statutory, Regional, Transport, Social, Environmental, Economic. Most jobs advertised are in Australia, but the service is extending now to Canada, New Zealand, UK and USA. Subscription for job-seekers is free, while employers pay a moderate charge to advertise. The weekly e-mail bulletin is in the form of a plain text message (no attachments) which lists employment opportunities according to location. Recent opportunities which remain open can be viewed on their web-site under Browse Jobs.
PlanJobs is a weekly e-mail and on-line service listing jobs in planning throughout Australia. As with Jobs in Planning, the weekly e-mail vacancy notifications are sent free of charge to jobs-seekers. Full details are on the PlanJobs web-site
Planning contacts: Planning Institute of Australia (PIA)
The Planning Institute of Australia publishes a state-by-state directory of planning consultancies in Australia. The list also gives the specialities of each firm and the address of PIA branches in the Australian States. The list is available from PIA.
A senior member of PIA has made these comments about job-hunting in Australia:
- The main PIA journal is quarterly, so it cannot perform the task that Planning does in the UK. There is therefore no specialist journal published sufficiently frequently to be a worthwhile source of advertisements.
- Advertisements for senior jobs in central and local government appear in the national newspaper (The Australian), which has a section for Public Appointments once a week. Regional daily newspapers such as the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age (Melbourne) also carry such appointments one day a week.
- Less senior jobs and temporary vacancies are often not advertised in places where UK planners could easily obtain them. It might therefore be worth contacting chief planning officers in larger local authorities, or senior partners in consultancies, to enquire about current vacancies.
The Young Planners area of the PIA website has a page on finding work as a planner in Australia, though note that the link to the Department of Immigration & Citizenship website is broken: try http://www.immi.gov.au/skilled/and http://www.immi.gov.au/visitors/working-holiday/ instead. The page includes information on registration with the National Employment Register, on which RTPI members are entitled to register. There is also a state-by-state list of consultancies employing planners. The PIA National Secretariat is at:
Planning Institute of Australia
Unit 16 Level 3
Engineering House
11 National Circuit
Barton
Canberra
ACT 2600
Australia
tel 00 61 2 62 62 59 33
fax 00 61 2 62 62 99 70.
Recruitment agencies
Recruitment agencies in the larger cities (Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney) are keen to talk to and advise qualified UK planners. One, based in New South Wales, has written to RTPI as follows:
We still have a critical demand for planners in Australia currently 17% to 19% of government positions remain unfilled. This equates to approximately 700 roles across all disciplines. This is compounded by the fact that fewer than 40 planners graduated in NSW last year [We] can be of significant assistance to anyone wishing to apply through us. We have submitted a proposal to local government regarding planners and have developed a process by which planners work for [this agency] and work in government roles on 1-2 year fixed term contracts under the terms of a 457 visa. This has a number of advantages. First it allows the candidate to maintain a continuous employment period. Even if the planner holds multiple planning roles, they will have been employed by [us] for the whole period. This makes the application for permanent residency in Australia very straightforward. Second it takes administration of managing overseas contractors away from the end user. All we need to do now is attract overseas planners wishing to apply. We also have facilities to video conference interview candidates with a view to them securing suitable positions from the UK
RTPI does not recommend particular recruitment agencies, but it is not difficult to find them with an internet search using the terms Recruitment, Australia, and Urban Planning with the name of a place which interests you, or look at the list on the Study-Travel-Work-Australia web-site. Matthew Roe mentions some in his article (below).
State of the labour market
We had heard anecdotally that Australian planners working in the UK had begun to return home after finding the economic climate here difficult, and have investigated whether that meant fewer posts were available to migrants. Correspondence in 2009 with the personnel department of a local authority in the state of Victoria elicited this response: I can only speak for Victoria, but certainly Planners are still very much in demand, particularly in Local Government. We have a job for an experienced planner vacant, and have had it vacant for over 12 months unable to fill. We are not alone in this barely a week goes by without at least a couple of Planning positions advertised in local government in Victoria. In relation to the economic downturn. It has impacted, but we are required to employ planners for regulatory purposes and despite the slower economy, there is still a lot of development happening. The downturn seems to have hit manufacturing hardest, with other areas of the economy still quite buoyant in parts.
That comment was made in 2009, but in early 2011 a former President of PIA visited RTPI and confirmed that this is still the case. That said, the posts that are hardest to fill are those outside the major cities hence perhaps the problems encountered by the shire councils of Victoria. UK planners might feel drawn to the cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane, but they are not necessarily where the jobs are to be found.
Doing your own research
To get a list of local Councils in the Australian States and Territories, see the list on Wikipedia or official State government websites e.g. Victoria; clicking on the Metropolitan map will give you contact details for each local authority around Melbourne, including its website. Each such site has a jobs page with current vacancies. If a job is listed for which you meet the specification, you can apply immediately; if not, you could send your CV (resumé) to the Human Resources department whose details are on each Council website. However you may not get a reply promptly, if at all, and it is not sensible to wait for an answer, so speculative approaches are likely to be unsatisfactory.
To research planning consultancies where your particular background could give you an edge, start with the Consultancy Directory on the PIA website. A grasp of Australian geography will help, as the quickest way to search for a company is by city/suburb/local authority name e.g. MELBOURNE (choose MELBOURNE - 3000, Victoria from the dropdown list offered) or MORELAND - 3058, Victoria. There is a useful map here.
Advice from members
An RTPI member who went to Melbourne in 2000 wrote back detailing his experiences in his (successful) quest for work - see below for this article. Another member who went to Australia in 2005 wrote: I am now in Australia and am being sponsored by a recruitment company to work for Auburn Council, in the west of Sydney. It was not easy! I spent almost 2 months working in a call centre selling credit cards when I first arrived in Australia [on a working holiday visa], but determination paid off and I am now doing Strategic Planning which is proving to be very interesting and challenging. [I contacted the recruitment agency before I left the UK and it ] has been incredibly helpful and sorted out all the visa details etc for me. I now have a sponsorship visa for a year, but am intending to work for 6 months and then get a tourism visa so that I can see more of Australia before I head home, although the people are so friendly here it will be very hard thinking about leaving!
More recently, Lara Wheatley used her working holiday visa to explore the country and work for a local authority. She wrote up the experience in Planning magazine (13 August 2010). If you do not have access to back copies, please email RTPI for the article. We can also send you recent personal accounts of members' experiences.
FINDING WORK IN AUSTRALIA
By Matthew Roe MRTPI, July 2000
On arriving in Melbourne I found employment almost immediately because Victoria was experiencing major problems with a lack of qualified town planning professionals. This was mainly created by a lack of graduates and a drain of staff to other professions. The majority of the work is in statutory planning (development control in England) in the public sector. If people are prepared to travel from the centre of Melbourne or live out in rural Victoria they should have little problem finding work.
The best way to find employment is dependent on the type of visa. Working holiday visas allow you to work for only three months with any one employer. Employment agencies are the best way of finding temporary work. All the following regularly have jobs for town planners:
Hoban Recruitment tel (Melbourne) 03 9650 0900
Hays Montrose, tel 03 9642 1900
Morgan Banks tel 03 9623 6765
Premium Personnel tel 03 9532 0333
Local authorities prefer employing temporary staff this way. Cold calling might work if they are desperate [Note from RTPI: at the moment, some are indeed desperate].
Alternatively people can send their CV direct to private planning consultancies. I eventually found a job this way with urbis, although the director was so busy it took him 4 months to find time to read my CV. [Note from RTPI: A list of planning consultancies can be obtained from the Planning Institute of Australia (PIA) details higher up the page.]
If people have a full visa with no restrictions the best bet to find work in Melbourne is through The Age newspaper which advertises permanent jobs of all kinds every Saturday.
Although the way planning applications are dealt with is identical to the UK, a zone-based rather than policy based system operates. Ideally people should get themselves acquainted with a Council's planning scheme (check out a council's website such as City of Stonnington) and check out the Victorian Planning Provisions on the State of Victoria's web site.
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