15/05/2026
🧡NORTHERN NEST PROGRAM UPDATE🧡
Over the past month, we have been busy delivering work readiness skills training to the northern nest crew. These are the practical capabilities that help young people show up, stick with challenges and navigate a workplace. Skills like self- regulation, distress tolerance and reflective practice.
Our approach is built around 3 steps: Experience, Understand, Apply
✨EXPERIENCE: Participants take part in an activity designed to put them inside the skill, whether that’s a moment of pressure, uncertainty or reflection, before any of it has been named or explained.
✨UNDERSTAND: We unpack what just happened. What did they notice? How did they respond? This is where the skill gets named and introduced
✨APPLY: The skill is connected to the job site, classroom, a job interview or everyday situations, so it leaves the room with them and becomes something they can train.
Think of it like any skill worth getting good at. Whether it’s footy, gymnastics, or learning an instrument, no one walks onto the field, the mat or the stage having never trained. You build the skill in lower- stakes settings, with reps, so it’s there when you need it.
These skills work exactly the same way. Rather than encountering this kind of pressure for the first time at a job interview, participants get safe exposure, a developmentally appropriate introduction, and guided opportunities to practice.
👏This week at Northern Nest, the young people tackled timed steel puzzles for self-regulation, a surprise exam style set up for distress tolerance and a video-and-sport analogy for reflective practice.
These are the skills which rarely make it into a curriculum or training plan, yet we expect young people to walk in already knowing them.
Major Training Group RTO 6139
AFL Cairns
