BATC laid off 15 employees from Atoskewin Success Center. (Facebook photo/BATC)

By Keaton Brown

gain valuable experience

BATC provides valuable short-term work experience

Mar 13, 2020 | 1:24 PM

The Battlefords Agency Tribal Chiefs (BATC) laid off 15 employees from the Atoskewin Success Center but said it was the best for everyone in the long run.

The positions the employees were hired to fill was intended to only run for a period of 14 to 19 weeks and are a regular occurrence at the BATC.

Alexis Christensen, director of communications at the BATC, said these positions are used to give people from the Atoskewin Success Center valuable workplace experience.

“What we do is we generally try to hire people and give them valuable work experience for the 14 or 19 weeks and then we lay them off with the hope that they will be able to move on,” she said.

Christensen explained these positions function much like a paid internship with a lot of turnover to expose as many people as possible to the valuable work experience.

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“That is the structure of Atoskewin to kind of have that revolving door. So some of the people that are being laid off now have worked for us for [14 to 19 weeks]. At the end of the day we need to open up those spaces for the new students to come in,” she said.

Christensen did say they have landed some new funding and will be using that to implement more programming at the Atoskewin Success Center.

“The pay that actually goes to our students and staff is from those funding agreements. We can’t keep extending people when that money runs out. We do make that known to them when they are hired with us. Usually they go through our programs and then we’ll fit them in somewhere for those 14 weeks,” she said.

She said they are always sad when they have to do these layoffs but they hope it is in the best interest for both parties.

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Keaton.brown@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @battlefordsnow