Eileen loves WISE because they helped her realise a dream-to drive a truck.

A few years ago, Eileen decided she needed a change. She had been working as a carer, for the elderly and people with a disability, for 25 years. The routine of long, tiring shifts was exhausting and as a single parent she wanted to spend more time with her teenage son.

In her typical ‘no nonsense’ style she quit and went to sit her forklift operator’s license. Nothing could have prepared her for how difficult it proved to be for a single mum, over forty and without relevant experience, to break into a workplace environment dominated by men. “I sent away so many resumes,” she recollects with disbelief. She knows it’s not very PC but she adds, “No one would give me a go because I was a woman. They’d ask how are you going to lift heavy things?”

When Eileen contacted WISE she had been unemployed for eight months and was becoming increasingly frustrated. “Tony couldn’t have been more helpful,” she says. He helped Eileen with her resume, talked her through interview techniques and organised funding for her to do a truck-driving course.

Eileen says that studying for the written component of the truck driver’s licence was the most difficult thing she has had to do in recent times, a real challenge. She passed and two years after leaving her old job Kirwan Power Sweeping offered Eileen a position doing what she loves: driving a truck. “They work around me. We compromise. When I can’t lift something I tell them and we work something out.” She is proud to be the only woman driving a truck in the company. If ever there was a pioneer of workplace culture change it is Eileen. Exuberant, gung-ho and hardworking, she tells it like it is.