Back to Class with The Hub

01

September — Building Resilience

Presented by Sri Prasad, The Hub's Occupational Therapist

Working in employment services is tough work. If you're struggling with self-care, holding your boundaries, or burnout, you're not alone.

Join Sri on Tuesday, September 15 or Thursday, September 17 for practical, realistic strategies to bolster your resilience — including skills you can turn around and use with the job seekers you support.

02

October — Breaking Barriers: Schizophrenia

Presented by Mateja Mihelcic, Career Services Consultant

Build your confidence in supporting job seekers living with schizophrenia. This practical webinar helps employment professionals understand how schizophrenia can shape the employment journey, recognize the barriers and the strengths that come with it, and work through strategies for effective, person-centred support.

You'll leave knowing how thoughtful adaptations, workplace accommodations, and collaborative approaches help job seekers move toward meaningful and sustainable employment.

03

November — Breaking Barriers: Supporting Justice-Involved Job Seekers

Presented by Shannon McCracken, Career Services Consultant

Justice involvement creates real barriers to employment: stigma, gaps in work history, record checks, and difficult conversations with employers.

This practical session helps employment professionals build confidence supporting justice-involved job seekers through respectful conversations, thoughtful employment planning, disclosure preparation, and realistic job search strategies.

You'll leave with approaches you can use right away to reduce barriers, challenge assumptions, and help job seekers move forward with confidence. Choose whichever of the two dates works for you.

04

Live Training with The Hub

Mateja Mihelcic Shannon McCracken

Practical support for the work you do every day. September 2026 – March 2027.

Employment services is complex work. Frontline professionals and managers balance job seeker needs, employment goals, documentation, caseload demands, employer relationships, and situations that don't come with a clear answer. The Hub is here to support you in that work.

Our professional development offers practical tools, strategies, and approaches to help teams build confidence, manage workload, strengthen service, and create more capacity for meaningful job seeker support. Each session includes an AI in Practice component, where appropriate, to explore how AI can support the work while keeping privacy, professional judgment, and the job seeker at the centre.

Training that fits your team

Every team is different, so sessions can be customized around your needs, your experience, and whatever is coming up right now. We can offer short micro-learning sessions, Lunch & Learns, focused workshops, half-day training, longer or multi-session learning, or something built around an emerging team need. Tell us where your team could use support and we'll build from there.

Ten topics, September 2026 – March 2027

1. Beyond “Job Ready” — disability, barriers, and inclusive practice in Integrated Employment Services.
2. Confident Conversations — saying what needs to be said. Clear, respectful, human.
3. Professional Boundaries & Role Clarity — supporting job seekers while staying grounded in your role.
4. From Unrealistic Goal to Achievable Direction — challenge the goal without taking away the hope.
5. Career Exploration That Leads Somewhere — turning “I don't know what I want to do” into a starting point.
6. Job Development & Employer Engagement in Practice — build relationships that create opportunities.
7. The Art of the Case Note — documenting the work without writing a novel.
8. Managing Higher-Volume Caseloads — managing time, workload, and mental load.
9. Inclusive & Adaptive Practice — creating services where more job seekers can engage and succeed.
10. AI in Employment Services — practical tools for supporting job seekers.

Pick one topic, combine a few into a longer learning experience, request a short Lunch & Learn, or come to us about something your team is running into that isn't on the list. “We keep getting stuck here” is enough to start the conversation.

For full course descriptions, click the link below — then open any topic to see everything it covers.

See the full PD catalogue

05

Start the Fall with Career Clarity

September is a fresh start, and that momentum carries right through the fall. For job seekers who aren't sure about their next step, career exploration is a great place to begin.

The Jackson Career Explorer (JCE) and the Ashland Interest Assessment help job seekers understand their interests, work preferences, strengths, and possible career directions. Rather than pointing to one “perfect job,” these assessments create a more focused conversation about what might fit.

They're especially useful for job seekers considering a career change, exploring training or education, returning to the workforce, or simply feeling stuck about what comes next. The results help identify new possibilities, highlight transferable skills, support employment planning, and give job seekers the language to describe what they're actually looking for in a role and a workplace.

The most valuable part is reviewing the results together — connecting them to the job seeker's experience, goals, barriers, and realistic next steps.

Wondering whether the JCE or the Ashland could support someone you're working with?

Career Exploration

06

More Than a Name Tag: Making the Most of Conference Season

Conference season is approaching, and with it comes something we don't get every day: a whole lot of employment professionals in one place. Conferences are a chance to attend workshops, hear new ideas, and learn about emerging practice. But some of the most valuable learning happens between sessions — in conversations with people doing the same work you are, in a different organization, community, or role.

So how do you make the most of it?

Go in with a question. Before you arrive, think about something you genuinely want to get better at. Maybe you're struggling to engage a specific group of job seekers, you'd love to manage a complex caseload more efficiently, or you're curious what other service providers do differently. Having a question in mind makes for stronger conversation starters. Instead of the classic “So, where do you work?” try “I noticed you're a job developer — what's working really well in your community?” You might be surprised where it leads.

Push yourself to meet new people. It's natural to gravitate toward coworkers and familiar faces, especially walking into a room full of strangers. But if you spend the whole conference with the people you arrived with, you're missing one of its biggest opportunities. You don't need to “network” with everyone in the room.

One meaningful conversation with another practitioner is worth more than twenty business cards.

Ask about their work, their challenges, and what they've learned. Share what's been working for you, too. Networking doesn't have to mean selling yourself — it can simply mean being curious about someone else's practice.

Remember you're an expert too. It's easy to attend a conference thinking about what you can learn from the people at the front of the room. There's expertise sitting beside you as well, and you're part of it. Every employment professional brings experience from different job seekers, employers, communities, programs, and challenges. If someone mentions a problem you've hit before, share what helped. If you've built a great resource, tell someone about it. If another organization is doing something interesting, ask questions. Our sector gets stronger when we stop keeping good ideas inside the walls of our own organizations.

Don't let it end at the conference. We've all done it — a fantastic conversation, contact information exchanged, a promise to stay connected, and then nothing. When you meet someone you'd genuinely like to learn from, follow up. “I really enjoyed our conversation about employer engagement. I'd love to stay connected and hear how that project develops” is enough. Over time, those small connections become people you swap resources with, troubleshoot alongside, collaborate with, or reach out to when you need another perspective.

Measure it by what changes, not by how many pages you filled. Take a little time to reflect before you drop back into your routine, and ask yourself: what is one thing I learned, one connection I want to maintain, and one thing I want to try?

You don't need to transform your practice after every conference. Sometimes one new idea, one useful resource, or one new professional relationship is enough. When you put that many people who care about employment services in one room, the opportunity isn't only to attend a conference — it's to learn from each other and take that back into the work.

If you see someone from The Hub @PATH at an upcoming conference, stop and say hello. We look forward to connecting!

07

Job Developer Tip: Get Ahead of Holiday Hiring

As students head back to school and summer jobs wind down, there's a gap opening up in the service sector — and with the holidays getting closer, September is a great time to connect with the employers who will soon need seasonal staff.

Start building those relationships early by offering value before you ask for anything. A few ways to do that:

• Send along market insights on hiring trends in your community.
• Watch for job postings with spelling errors or cluttered formatting, and send the employer a cleaned-up copy that's ready to copy and paste.
• Invite them to networking opportunities with community partners.

The transition into fall is a fantastic opportunity to create connections that open amazing doors for job seekers later on.