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Government of South Australia - Department of State Development

    Shipbuilding Employment Pathways: Trevor's success

    Trevor Smart spent over thirty years of his career with Santos. Working as an operator/maintainer across the Simpson Desert and Cooper Basin, he says he was a fly-in-fly-out worker ‘before FIFO was a thing’.

    Trevor's story

    After taking on some training coordinator roles in the oil and gas industry, Trevor made the transition into TAFE SA, including as an Engineering Lecturer for the government-funded Shipbuilding Employment Pathways (SEP) program.

    Here, Trevor’s industry experience has proven critical.

    “Being in an industry like oil and gas, discipline and procedures and processes are now a critical element. This is also important to the defence industry.”

    Trevor says that, to date, the SEP program has attracted a real cross-section of people.

    “It’s just amazing the diversity of people we see come through,” he said. “Large employers for the shipbuilding projects appear to be very conscious of ensuring they get a diverse group in place."

    “Some of them haven’t got much experience in industry. They’re at that front end of their learning path. It’s critical to teach work ethic, respect, procedural discipline."

    “Our task is to get them into the trade and help mould them into good tradespeople.”

    Trevor keeps students engaged by providing real-world context to the classroom learning.

    “They come in to do maths, and look at what we call computations, and they’re going – ‘well, I did this at school’,” he said. “But then you start showing them how maths and radius and area and all those calculations come into play.”

    “They want to become tradespeople. They’re hands-on people. Our job is to apply the context and make sure we engage them and give them a reason why they should be interested in this.”

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    Explore the current defence industry workforce opportunities for workers and job seekers