Why Choose Us?
Great people
We are flexible in our mindset and give you the opportunity to experience, contribute and develop outside of your regular role. The dynamic and varied nature of Cardinia means more interesting and diverse challenges, creating greater opportunities to find innovative solutions to our communities needs.
Meaningful work
Our commitment goes beyond the workplace. We’re dedicated to making a real impact on the lives of our community members and enhancing the overall quality of life in our Shire. The contributions we make here are something we’re genuinely proud of, and they’re transforming both our Shire and our workplace for the better.
Hear about the incredibly meaningful work we do for our shire
Extraordinary opportunities
Cardinia Shire Council is a friendly, welcoming and flexible place to work where individual differences are valued and celebrated. We take trust seriously and encourage you to be you. We welcome people of all ages, all cultures and all characteristics – just like our community!
Find out what extraordinary opportunities await you at Cardinia Shire Council
Our benefits
Our employees don’t have their own desks. Instead, they choose a workspace that best suits the work they need to do at any given time – whether that’s working individually or collaborating with others. This approach applies to all staff in the organisation including the CEO and senior leadership team.
Activity based working (ABW) helps us achieve better collaboration and communication between departments and staff, leading to greater productivity and efficiency. To enable this way of working, our offices at the civic centre and depot have a range of different workspaces and meeting places to suit individual or collaborative work.
The advanced mobile and digital technology available to our staff means they can move freely around the building as their tasks change during the working day, or work remotely as required. These technologies have improved our customer response times and significantly reduced our dependence on paper.
Our lived experience through the COVID-19 pandemic and ‘future of work’ project has highlighted how traditional workplaces and ways of working have evolved. We see this as an opportunity to create a new model of working that benefits Cardinia Shire Council’s employees without compromising on service delivery to our community, and that’s also in one with our organisational values and ‘Together Different Future’ framework.
As an organisation that looks towards the future, Cardinia Shire Council is determined to operate a working arrangements model that enables the organisation to best meet the needs of our community, teams and employees. We recognise that at times you’ll need flexibility to balance your work and personal life. We support job sharing as an option for employees who are unable to work full-time due to family or other commitments.
We have a variety of leave entitlements available to eligible staff, including:
- Accrued/Rostered days off
- Purchased leave (up to an additional 4 weeks)
- Study leave
- 16 weeks paid parental leave (for eligible primary carers)
- 2 weeks paid partner leave (for non-primary carers)
- Pre-natal leave
- Cultural, ceremonial and religious leave
- Donor leave
- Emergency services leave
- Bereavement/compassionate leave
- Carer’s leave
- Long service leave
Our staff are our greatest asset. We continuously run a variety of activities as part of our corporate Health and Wellbeing program. Recent examples include:
- Onsite wellbeing consultant
- Free annual flu vaccinations
- Private health insurance through GMHBA
- Health information sessions
- Social club, with events throughout the year
- Subsidised skin checks
- 10,000 Steps corporate challenge
- RUOK Day events and info sessions
- Wellbeing self-assessments
To support our staff in living a healthy and active lifestyle, we offer our employees discounted fitness memberships at Cardinia Life Leisure Centre in Pakenham.
All staff have access to our free and confidential employee assistance program (EAP). The program provides short-term professional counselling on personal matters, including anger and violence, depression, anxiety, emotional difficulties, gambling, drug, alcohol and other addictions, grief, bereavement and loss, loneliness and mental health.
All Cardinia staff have the opportunity to participate in a range of in-house corporate training sessions in areas such as leadership, effective customer service, disability awareness, emotional awareness and conflict resolution.
We encourage staff to undertake further formal education at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels in subjects relevant to their current position and agreed career path. Financial assistance is available to help pay fees for formal study and required texts. We can support up to 50 per cent of study-related costs.
Employees who undertake formal education have access to paid study leave beyond standard annual leave to attend classes, exams and undertake study related to their education.
