Can you tell me more about a typical day in the life at NIAA?

That’s a difficult question because it really depends on your role. The nature of the work environment is consistently changing, but we also had a very interrupted year with working from home and lockdowns. What a typical day has look like changes considerably during the year depending on the rotation you’re in. I’m in the corporate group of the agency. We’re kind of the support team for the crew and the COO.

So a lot of what we do is to support the crew and in a sense, the whole corporate side of the agency. That kind of facilitation role, responding to requests on the go is really appealing to me because my days do look really different and it’s very responsive work.My typical day is really dependent on the type of requests that come through. I do like being in the office and getting to work closely with the people around me. There are also times I get to do independent work on my computer and I can zone in a little bit so I like the mixture as well.

Some graduates look at the media clips and see what’s happening, if parliament is sitting that day then there might be questions on notice. If I’m in question time brief, I make sure that the minister is ready for questions that might come up during parliament. She might be meeting with stakeholders, to the indigenous providers of services, and understanding how they’re using the grant money. Other graduates might be working on some data interpretation or writing reports. You might be writing a brief to the executive to prepare them for a meeting with a senior stakeholder or another minister. Those sort of things. That’s just a bit of a snapshot of some tasks that come to mind.

What Hannah has to say:

My favorite piece of work that I’ve worked on might be my last rotation in the legal services branch where I got to draft bits of legislation. I got to draft a notifiable instrument which is actually really cool and fun. The team was looking at a class action about removals and stolen generation and so I got to do a research project into what removals look like, who was carrying them out, and all these different things.

I think one of the things that sets the agency apart is the important work that we do, but it’s also extremely challenging and extremely complex, but that’s the purpose of the agency and it’s at the centre of what we do. So while there are some difficult tasks, that’s required to be able to move forward for a greater future. So understand that it is extremely challenging and confronting, but extremely rewarding.

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