Joseph Fatnowna
A mentor to many
Joseph Fatnowna is the Indigenous Development Manager based in Mackay.
Joseph started with BIS in November 2008 and has been recruited into the Indigenous Development team to help BIS reach its 10% indigenous target by 2011. He is a family man with a wife of 20 years, Marguerite, and a 17 year old son, Adam.
He is a proud Indigenous man who is pleased to be able to provide employment and training opportunities for indigenous workers with BIS.
Cross-cultural training
To ensure our non-Indigenous employees understand and respect the significance of Indigenous people as the traditional custodians of the land on which the company operates, we provide Aboriginal Cultural Awareness training to non-Indigenous employees. Each work site regularly invites a person from the local Indigenous community to add information about local appropriate cultural protocols and to teach employees about the local history. To ensure everybody has the same level of awareness, we also support our contractors in their employees’ Aboriginal Cultural Awareness training.
We have developed an Industrial Cultural Awareness training to help Indigenous employees settle into the business and our culture. We provide a structured mentoring programme for Indigenous employees, and support mentoring relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous employees. Our recruitment strategy ensures that Indigenous people enter the company at multiple levels and more experienced Indigenous employees often become mentors to their Indigenous colleagues.
The organisation promotes training and up-skilling, as it improves employee retention and helps BIS to meet current and future labour demands.
The BIS Skills Development Centre offers apprenticeships to BIS employees. Training can be on-the-job, off the job, or a combination of both to achieve the nationally recognised and accredited certificates.
Indigenous management
We founded our dedicated Indigenous Development Team in 1999 to give us access to wide-ranging skills and experiences in industry, state and federal government agencies. More importantly, the team consists of Indigenous people, which enables us to work closely with Indigenous communities in the areas of employment, training and small business development. The team is experienced in explaining the issues that Indigenous peoples face and our role in possible solutions to senior management.
BIS Indigenous development Strategy 2008 – 2011 provides us with a proactive approach to Indigenous development.