The IEP is delighted to announce James Weait FIEP has joined the IEP Australia team as Senior Advisor of Partnerships and Growth and is now also a Fellow of the IEP. With a wealth of experience in the welfare and employment services sector and a desire for making a positive impact on local communities, James’ focus is on expanding IEP’s footprint in Australia – at a crucial time when the sector is undergoing significant reforms.
We talk to James about his new role, his work experience, IEP Fellowship, the power of exercise paired with counselling and passion for writing fiction and poetry.
What does your role as Senior Advisor Partnerships and Growth for IEP Australia entail?
I am seeking to build on IEP’s current Australian footprint and partnerships. The Australian employability sector is going through a huge moment of reform across all employment service disciplines and the need for the kind of support and quality frameworks IEP is proven to deliver has arguably never been greater.
What is your background and the skills and experience you bring to the IEP?
Like many others, I ‘fell’ into employment services in 2004 and worked for the Ingeus Group as an Employment Advisor, before various regional and national management roles across several contracts, including The Employment Zone, Pathways to Work, Work Programme, and JobActive in Australia as part of a joint venture with Mission Australia.
In 2019, I established Populi Solutions. At Populi we work with many of the biggest providers in the Australian sector, offering project management, leadership coaching and innovative training programs for clients of welfare programs. I also currently hold a role as Board Advisor to Parkhouse Bell, the prominent employability recruitment specialist in Australia and am a member of the board for Younity, a Queensland-based charity that specialises in youth engagement initiatives and social enterprises.
I believe, apart from experience in the sector, I hope to bring a synergy of values to the IEP, ‘Populi’ is a Latin word that means ‘of the people’ and I distilled my purpose down to that, trying to make a difference for people in local communities either directly through considered interventions or, more often, indirectly, through influencing of policy and leadership across providers in the sector. From what I have seen of the IEP services and products so far, there is such a significant impact they will have on the quality of the interventions a client can receive.
Why did you want to become a Fellow of the IEP, and what does the Fellowship mean to you?
The challenges the sector faces are very complex, evolving every day, and I believe it requires a collective effort to mitigate them. With that in mind, the chance to apply to be a part of the international network of like-minded senior industry professionals was a very simple call to make. I see an absolute synergy in mission and values with the work we do at Populi.
What are your aims and passions as a Fellow, and what will your Fellowship bring to the IEP?
I am really looking forward to learning from other fellows and having the chance to bring to the table some of the best practice, learning and experience I have gained from the last 20 years of frontline delivery, operational leadership, contract implementations, consulting projects, leadership coaching and innovative programme delivery.
Do you have any professional passions (sector-related) and if so, can you tell us about them?
Over the last 2 decades, I have come to appreciate more and more the power that the positive routine of exercise, combined with counselling, can have in reducing anxiety and building confidence ready for work. By some distance, Populi’s most popular programme is called ‘GLOVES’, a combination of a group box-fit hour followed by a second hour of group allied health. We are seeing profound improvements in DASS-21 scores from the first to last sessions and are starting to build a proof of concept that releasing endorphins is a hugely powerful way to engage clients with complex barriers, having the client as receptive as possible to the mental health tips that will genuinely help.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself. What are your personal passions and anything else you would like to add?
One of my hobbies is writing fiction and poetry. This is now manifesting in a pet project I am collaborating on with a disability provider in Australia nominally called The PrESs (note the Employment Services – ES pun in the middle!). The PrESs is intended to empower clients by; inviting them to submit photography, art, poetry, fiction, non-fiction – real inspirational stories for publication; having an incubation-style editing team of clients (that is based from a different location every month, overseen by an experienced facilitator) pulling each issue together using magazine software as a practical activity and valuable experience for resumes; ultimately also bringing the best of the content together into a book, intermittently, to be published with one of our 2 identified (and early stages of interested) publishers, where the clients will take the significant percentage share royalties.
