Indigenous Psychological Services

IPS has a unique focus on the retention of Aboriginal people in the workplace. As a company this is achieved through the following mechanisms:

• Including a unique assessment protocol (the Indigenous Work Attitudes Beliefs Inventory, IWABI) within its recruitment battery that focuses on identifying issues that may impact on their long term retention of Aboriginal people in the workplace. The IWABI has attracted national interest primarily because retention is often a bigger issue for organisations than valid recruitment processes.
• IPS' comprehensive training packages ("Staying Deadly in the Workplace") which focus on the development of skills specific to retaining Aboriginal people in the workplace. This package has been developed over a period of five years and exists as twelve separate modules. The development of these modules has been based on research conducted by IPS which was able to identify the primary reasons for success and failure of Indigenous people in the workplace. All of these issues were psychosocial and cultural in nature, as opposed to being the result of a lack of skills in the job. Further, the package content has been rigorously evaluated as well as validated by Indigenous people, again making it unique within the field. Evaluations consistently indicate enormous skills acquisition as well as ability to apply new skills into both the home and work environment. IPS' evaluations are rigorous and compared at pre-workshop and post-workshop levels.