NDIS INDUSTRY HUB

National Disability Insurance Scheme

EMPLOYING IN THE NDIS IN AUSTRALIA

Industry Overview

The NDIS industry is suffering from an acute shortage of Allied Health staff because we just don’t have enough professionals in Australia to meet the needs of our population. Not only that, employers in many other industries such as Occupational Rehab, Clinical, Counselling and the NFP sector are competing for that same pool of professionals. 

We find that most NDIS providers are either Occ Rehab providers that have branched out into NDIS or exclusive NDIS service providers, from SMEs to large national providers. A lot of NDIS providers have set themselves up as NFP groups to get tax breaks and provide their staff with a suite of NFP employee benefits.

We’ve found the salaries, benefits packages and work arrangements have changed substantially since the introduction of the NDIS, especially post-Covid. 

“If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on.”—Sheryl Sandberg

Salary

Salaries in the industry for physical candidates: OT, Physiotherapist & Exercise Physiologist 

  • Graduates: $65,000 – $80,000 base + super 
  • Candidates with 1-2 years experience: $75,000-$90,000 base + super 
  • Candidates with 3-5 years experience: $90,000 – $110,000 base + super 
  • Management level salaries: $100,000 base + super and above

Salaries in the industry for psychological candidates: Psychologists, Social Workers, Behaviour Support Practitioners

  • Graduates are $65,000 – $75,000 base + super 
  • Candidates with 1-2 years experience: $75,000-$85,000 base + super 
  • Candidates with 3-5 years experience: $85,000 – $110,000 base + super 
  • Management level salaries: $100,000 base + super and above

Allied Health Assistants: Salaries range from $60,000 – $75,000 base + super 

The above are general indicators. There are always exceptions to the rule and unique circumstances e.g. location, industry, role depth, employer salary band-widths, work arrangement etc that determine the wages offered to job-seekers. 

 “Opportunities don’t happen, you create them.”—Chris Grosser

Benefits

What’s the competition doing? Let’s find out! 

$: Regular Salary Reviews | Performance Bonus | Extra Superannuation Contributions | Salary sacrifice or Salary Packaging arrangements | Corporate Discounts – one of our NFP clients gives their team discounted medical and health insurance.

Tools of Trade: Mobile | Laptop | Tablet  | Speech to Text Software

Admin & Reception Support: Free up time by dictating your reports and let the admin team do the rest

Travel: Pool Car Access | Novated Lease | Per Km reimbursement | Go Get car Aaccess | Set amount per timeframe | Petrol Card (one of our clients gives their team members a petrol card for work and personal use – booya!)

Knowledge & Assessment Suitcase: Subscriptions, both hard-copy and soft-copy | Professional Development $, comprehensive induction | On-going mentoring and in-services by subject matter experts

Extra Leave: One of our clients is a school and they give their staff 7 weeks’ leave. Other clients give their staff reservist leave, doona days, volunteer, pet and birthday leave. 

Parental Leave: One of our clients gives their staff the difference between their wage and the government mandated parental leave subsidy for the full 16 weeks. The NDIS industry is heavily female-dominated in terms of Allied Health professionals working in it. Now read that again.

Social and team building Dos: Paid for by the company. One of our clients paid for their whole team to do axe-throwing and a cooking class – not on the same day…

“The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.” – Phil Jackson

Health, Wellness & EAP: Pool, yoga or gym access or contribution | Confidential EAP to assist you when you need a hand 

Career Mapping: Clients spend a lot of time and money training and supporting their staff. It matters to candidates that you want them to succeed and grow. 

“I prefer to praise employees for what they’re doing right, and it tends to lead to them doing more of the same. Not always, but it’s the way I choose to bet.” – Richard Branson

So, if you’re wondering what other employers are doing to attract talent, it may be time to look at your benefits packages, job-structure or hiring, on-boarding and training protocol.

“Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.”—Booker T. Washington

Job Structure

  • Full-time
  • Part-time
  • WFH
  • Work from the office
  • Community-based
  • Mobile
  • Telehealth
  • Face-to-face
  • Contracting

Locations

Wherever there is a person with a disability, an NDIS professional is required.

Now that the NDIS has become part of our everyday lives, there’s a near constant demand for Allied Health staff to work with clients with a disability.

Hiring

“You need to have a collaborative hiring process.” – Steve Jobs

Some employers have a 3-step recruitment process:

  1. A screening by internal HR.
  2. A 1st interview
  3. A 2nd interview and reference checks.

This is not to mention possible psych, probity or technical skills testing. For this to happen, the job-seekers and employers have to match diaries etc. 

Some employers still insist on an initial face-to-face meeting. Just keep in mind that this is a candidate-short market where job-seekers are looking at multiple employers at the same time. It might help to re-examine your hiring process, especially if you keep missing out on candidates who have accepted other offers while you’re still going through the motions of your recruitment process.

Candidates have also told us is that some employers give jobseekers a deadline of 24 hours to accept their offer. We don’t recommend this because it puts pressure on a candidate to make a decision. 3 days to make a decision is a much more reasonable timeframe.

We admit, it’s a fine balance. Please reach out to your Medijobs Australia consultant if you’re wondering what candidates are saying about your recruitment process. We don’t mince words and give honest feedback. We’re also happy to work with you to let you know what’s working and what’s not in terms of best process hiring protocols. 

“A little imagination combined with massive action goes a long way.” ~ Grant Cardone

Candidates Love

Salaries that reflect their skills and experience for the job that they are doing.

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” – Steve Jobs

Benefits packages customised to their needs e.g. they may prefer a novated lease option if they don’t own or have access to a car. 

Induction: A comprehensive on-boarding and induction process when they start as well as on-going mentoring, in-services, CPD contributions and shadowing of senior consultants. 

KPIs: Graded introduction to KPIs so that the pressure to bill, bill, bill isn’t hanging over their heads.

Career-mapping: A strategic approach to the next steps in their career as opposed to an ad hoc approach. It’s always good to know what you have to do to achieve your career goals.

Health & Wellness: Employer contributions towards health and wellness, including access to a confidential EAP service.

Admin support: Who doesn’t love having access to voice to text services and an admin team. 

Extra leave: Any extra leave that employers can offer is welcome e.g. ‘no reason needed days off’, Reservist’s Leave, pet leave, volunteer leave. You can call it anything you like but what the job-seeker sees is that this employer is amazing as they recognise that everyone needs a day off sometimes.

“I have always believed that the way you treat your employees is the way they will treat your customers, and that people flourish when they are praised.” – Richard Branson

Parental Leave and flexibility: Many job-seekers will start a family at some stage of their working life, so it really helps employers can give benefits around this.

For example, one of our employer partners offers their staff the difference between their company wage and the government-mandated parental leave payment – for the whole 16 weeks! (Guess who gets the candidates when there are competing offers!)

They also offer their staff the option of a combination of WFH and part-time hours when they return to work after their parental leave. 

“Take time to appreciate employees and they will reciprocate in a thousand ways.” – Dr. Bob Nelson

Pool car access: Over our 20 years in recruitment, we’ve found that job-seekers don’t want wear and tear on their personal vehicles for work purposes, so they LOOOOVE pool-car access because they can take public transport to work and still do their job.

AHAs: A lot of our NDIS Consultants really appreciate their AHAs who are able to implement parts of the role that do not require the NDIS consultants’ ongoing input. This frees up time for the NDIS consultant to work with even more NDIS clients. Win-win for all: the NDIS clients, the employers, the NDIS consultant and the AHA! 

Candidates Hate

Over promise and under deliver: There’s absolutely no advantage in over-selling the role only for the job-seekers to start and find out that the reality is very different. If you have a high rate of candidates leaving in a short space of time, it’s a good idea to conduct exit interviews to see where you’re letting them and yourself as an employer down.

“Don’t hire anyone you wouldn’t want to run into in the hallway at three in the morning.”  – Tina Fey

Lack of or no on-boarding and induction: Trust us, they hate it.

Travel: A lot of candidates don’t like to travel long distances. Sometimes it can’t be helped, but in that case the employer needs to recognise that their billable targets might need adjusting to account for time spent travelling. Put yourself in your employees shoes: would you feel extra pressure if you had to do that? Then it’s likely they are too. Unrelenting pressure = a good reason to start looking for a new job. You do the maths.

Lack of business structure: We could tell you many anecdotes of newly set up NDIS employers who call us and say, they’ve just set up as an NDIS provider and  need an OT, Physio and Psychologist yesterday. Do they have job descriptions? No. Do they know what kind of clients they’re working with? No. Induction and training processes? We’re working on that.

At this point, we don’t even bother asking about their strategic growth plans or career-mapping for their staff. 

If you’re reading this and it sounds like you, then please address this situation. It’s tricky enough for job-seekers when they start a new job – if the workplace is a shemozzle from day one, the chances of them staying for the long haul are low. Like, really, really low. 

Unrelenting admin: A lot of our NDIS consultants have indicated that they don’t enjoy the amount of administrative and report-writing associated with their roles.

One of our employers has recognised this, and gives their team the option to conduct the assessment and make the relevant case notes and dictate their findings, then has an in-house consultant write the report within the next 24 hours. The consultant works from home, and can write the report any time, day or night, within that 24 hours.  

“Employees are a company’s greatest asset – they’re your competitive advantage. You want to attract and retain the best; provide them with encouragement, stimulus, and make them feel that they are an integral part of the company’s mission.” – Anne M. Mulcahy

Show me the money: If you are not keeping up with the industry in terms of salaries and benefits to match what your competition is doing or what job-seeker expectations are, then prepare to lose staff or not be able to attract them to begin with. 

Job structure: Candidates have told us that as they progress through their career, the demands on their time change. They may have a family or want to work in a more flexible capacity for their own self actualisation. An employer who doesn’t work with their staff on this (assuming they have the capacity, of course), risks losing staff to an employer who can offer them the flexibility that they seek.

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” ~ Bill Gates

Training

Onboarding: Have you conducted all the necessary checks before the candidate starts? Do they have all the paperwork that they need to fill out prior to starting work with you? Make sure they do. 

Induction: Do you have a structured induction process? A scatter gun approach at a start leaves a new employee not knowing if they’re Artha or Martha. The more you can support, train, mentor and assist new staff settle into their role, the better. 

We have noticed that a lot of established NDIS employers have exceptionally comprehensive induction and training processes to support their new starters. If you tend to have an ad hoc approach in this, we highly recommend addressing that situation, pronto. 

Shadowing a Senior: This has proven to be a very popular strategy with our new starters in the industry. It means that they see excellent modelling and there’s nothing better than learning from the best of the best about what your company has to offer. Not to mention the social aspect of being mentored by an in-house senior team member.

“By learning you will teach, by teaching you will learn” – Latin Proverb

In-services: Subject Matter Experts, both internal and external can be utilised to share their knowledge with your team members. These can be delivered remotely as well as face-to-face. Who doesn’t like the idea of learning as part of their work team or sharing their knowledge with their colleagues? As Leanardo Da Vinci said, “ Learning never exhausts the mind”.

CPD: All we can say is that the more generous you are with professional development, the more likely you are to be able to support your staff through various stages of their career with you. 

“It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.”~ Walter Disney

Contact Medijobs Australia