The challenge.
- Create employment opportunities for people with disability by identifying project work suitable for Jigsaw trainees
Epic Energy is one of Australia’s leading energy infrastructure companies that prides itself on its focus on people and relationships.
In late 2020, Epic Energy learnt that Jigsaw had expanded its reach to South Australia and opened a hub in Adelaide.
Inspired by Jigsaw’s innovative pathway to mainstream employment for people with disability, Epic sought to engage with Jigsaw to identify suitable projects that would provide the real-life work experience that sets Jigsaw’s training program apart from traditional models.
The solution.
The team at Epic Energy chose ‘Project Connect’ – a large volume of paper-based documents that needed digitising. With years of experience in digitisation (in their three hubs), Jigsaw was the perfect fit to undertake this project.
Epic Energy was Jigsaw Adelaide’s inaugural client and Project Connect facilitated the creation of three full-time paid traineeships and a small team of trainers supporting them. In the early days, this work initially took place in Epic’s office and was later moved to Jigsaw’s office on Grenfell Street in the CBD.
Epic required the onsite Jigsaw team to digitise over 1200 files and coordinate the destruction of approximately 400 boxes of nominated archive documents.
The paid trainees undertook this significant project with attention to detail, enthusiasm, professionalism, and care.
The results.
Epic achieved its goal: the project created 3 jobs for people with disability at Jigsaw and supported a further 50 unpaid trainees with work experience.
The engagement has not only fostered an inclusive culture, it has also delivered positive and practical business outcomes.
It helped to facilitate a smooth transition to Epic’s new office space in the CBD, with their records and documents digitised for ease of organisation and document retrieval. It also allowed Epic to maintain an up-to-date and secure database, with the Jigsaw team taking care of the destruction of documents that were no longer needed.
Currently, Jigsaw is still supplying a team of (at least) two dedicated paid trainees to digitise Epic’s hard copy records, and one Team Lead (Jigsaw Trainer) who is skilled in Jigsaw’s digitisation processes.
“I joined Jigsaw as a paid trainee as part of Jigsaw’s expansion into Adelaide in December 2021. Myself and two fellow paid trainees, under the supervision of Jigsaw trainers, began the giant task of scanning two archive rooms worth of documents all into one digital database. I’m grateful to Epic Energy for the opportunity and responsibility that comes with a 40-hour work week. But most of all I’m grateful that this project has given me the knowledge to help teach people with disabilities and watch their self-confidence grow so that they may reach their employment goals.”
“Epic is proud to have provided the foundation for Jigsaw’s commercial offering in South Australia, and to have the opportunity to support the Jigsaw team and engage trainees in meaningful work. The relationship between Jigsaw and Epic has been mutually rewarding, and we look forward to exploring further opportunities to partner with Jigsaw in the future.”
About Jigsaw Digital
Jigsaw is a social enterprise offering a range of market-leading digitisation and information management services to organisations across Australia. We provide a range of competitive on-site and off-site end-to-end document services including large volume scanning, small volume scanning, day forward scanning, back scanning, book scanning, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and document destruction. Additionally we offer remote admin support, workflow process administrative assistance, data entry, database clean up, document verification and document upload. Jigsaw’s services are available Australia wide.