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Hidden job market in early childhood education and care

~ Storykate ~ Leave a comment

Most educators looking for work in early childhood head straight to SEEK, Indeed or Jora, refresh the page every morning, and wait. Fair enough. That is what we are all taught to do. As a journalist, I always try to find sneaky ways or hidden vacancies.

This will surpise you 🙂 A lot of the best positions are filled before anyone writes an advertisement.

Centres often fill vacancies from their own pool, from so-called sister cenres, director’s network; and … through a recommendation, a placement student who impressed everyone, a casual relief educator who already knows the room, or someone who simply introduced themselves a few months earlier. This is what I mean by the hidden job market. It relied on relationships and timing, and you can absolutely get into it.
Your goal is to become the first person a director thinks of when a position opens up.

1. Make a list of services you would love to work at. I usually start with the local exceeding or even excellently rated services.

Start before there is a vacancy. Research the services that actually match your values, then get to know them properly. Read their philosophy, look at their programs, notice how they talk about children. Drive or walk past and observe some practices.

✓ Long day care ✓ Kindergartens and sessional services ✓ Montessori or Reggio-inspired centres ✓ Bush kinders and nature programs ✓ Community-based services ✓ Not-for-profit organisations

2. Introduce yourself

Most directors respect an educator who is initiative and engaged in the job search. Send a short, warm email with your resume attached, your availability, your qualifications or expected completion date, and a couple of honest lines about why their service interests you.

3. Use your placement network

Professional experience is one of the strongest pathways into your first job, and the connections outlast the placement itself. Stay in touch with your supervising teacher, the educational leader, the director, the educators you worked beside, and your university peers. Do not burn the bridges!

From my experience, placement is one of the best ways to get hired.

4. Join relief agencies

Casual work builds your experience and your confidence at the same time. It also puts you in front of directors across many services, which means people know your name and your practice before a permanent role ever opens.

https://www.vic.gov.au/register-recruiter-find-early-childhood-jobs

5. Attend professional events

Early Childhood Australia events, local network meetings, council professional learning, conferences, workshops, university networking evenings. These rooms are full of educational leaders, and vacancies get mentioned out loud long before they get advertised.

6. Build your professional job portfolio

Your reputation starts well before your first permanent position. Keep your resume current, your LinkedIn profile updated, your Working With Children Check ready, and your references organised so you can move quickly when something comes up.

I always bring my folio or ipad with photo evidence to the important interviews.

Here is my video on how to create your portfolio

7. Tell people you are looking

So many opportunities arrive through ordinary conversations. Mention it to friends, family, lecturers, placement mentors, previous employers and classmates. Someone usually knows a service that needs an educator. That’s how I found my first job actually.

8. Be specific about what you want

“I’m happy to do anything” is too vague. Let’s use the manifestation approach here and calibrate our brain to help up to find the best opportunity for us.

Try something closer to this. “I’m looking for a graduate Early Childhood Teacher position where I can keep developing my practice in play-based learning and build strong relationships with children and families.”

That sentence gives someone a real picture, and real pictures stick.
Your brain also loves it!
9. Follow up

Contacted a service and heard nothing back? Send a polite follow-up a week or two later. It reads as professional and interested, and it puts your name in front of them a second time.

One last thing

Your next job might never appear on a job board at all. It might begin with a placement, a casual shift, a recommendation, a conversation at a workshop, or one short email to a centre you have admired for months.

Make yourself visible while the vacancy is still hypothetical. That is where the hidden market lives.

Cheers, Storykate

Forager Pedagogy – well, that’s something new

~ Storykate ~ Leave a comment

Today I’ve learned about a new approach called forager pedagogy. This pedagogy is grounded in First Nations perspectives, which, as you know, are an important part of the EYLF and the Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework. Our core curriculum documents.

A foraging approach means you are someone who forages. Picking mushrooms, berries. Something very cultural for me. I grew up in the country, in the environment called tundra, in the Arctic North, and I foraged a lot. I used to walk on country. It’s something I keep enjoying, because for me it provides a lens of relaxing, of mindfulness, of being with myself while being deeply connected to something bigger than I am.

Walking is the easiest way to relax, to become more mindful, to feel grounded

So let’s talk about the theory behind it.

The core idea of foraging is to look for something. In literature, they call it look for traces of ghosts of what is now gone. Following marks, seeking out, paying attention. You shift perspective up and down, from the sky to the ground, far into the distance and then up close. Your eyes relax. Your gestures become more animal-like. You move your body the way other non-human animals do. You also recognise how you have become separated from all of it through boots and clothes. That gives you a sense of grounding, at least it does for me.

Adopting this lens matters if you’re looking to welcome more First Nations perspectives, country-based learning and play-based pedagogy into your practice. The EYLF now encourages us to do all of this.

Think about how you can use this pedagogy to create more presence, or refiguring presence, as they say in the research and in the book on children and nature. I really like the idea of relational kinship, which goes back to being with country and to First Nations perspectives, where country is a living entity, and where family, ancestors, lore and spiritual beliefs are all part of it. Lore here is something like law and regulations, or moral law. This way you become part of something bigger, and you provide reciprocal care. You look after country, and country looks after you.

You can also think of the forager lens as noticing ways of communication. Children are still acquiring language, so we can look at how plants, animals, mushrooms and mycelium communicate. What signals, what warnings, what conversations are happening?

One of the easiest things to do is walk. That gives you sensory attunement as well. When you’re tired, you can sit down and sit with country, or sit on a stump while you’re picking mushrooms, which is completely natural. While you do it, you can listen to the earth’s heartbeat. You can lie down and look at the sky, at the clouds, and feel the wind.

This is something I encourage you to start doing with children. And by yourself.

Early Childhood Role in the spotlight: Play helper

~ Storykate ~ Leave a comment

Today I found an interesting job advertised. It’s called play helper, with Play Matters Australia, and it caught my eye because it’s such an unusual entry role in early childhood education. It isn’t in long day care.

For this job you need a Working with Children Check, some experience with children and families, and even a few months of that is a good start. That’s what makes it a lovely segue into the sector, and it keeps you close to play.

The role is play helper at a supported playgroup. Organisations like Play Matters Australia run playgroups across different communities, and some of them are funded. I used to work for a not-for-profit that ran playgroups too, so I know the setting well.

As a play helper, you set up the play spaces, which was always one of my favourite jobs. You put out a simple play experience, welcome families as they arrive, and model calm, respectful interactions that help children settle. You also show parents and guardians how to facilitate play with their own children.

I think it’s a great role because it runs on people skills. The pay is modest. What you get in return is warm, hands-on work with families, and for a lot of people, that’s the part that matters most.

The role

https://www.ethicaljobs.com.au/members/playmatters/play-helper-clyde-cranbourne?locations=1

When a Child Says “I Don’t Like You”

~ Storykate ~ Leave a comment


A reflection for early childhood educators on trust, connection, and the moments that stay with you.

Some of the deepest lessons in early childhood come straight from the children, often the ones who are hardest to reach.

This is a story about one of them, and a single morning in Cranbourne that has stayed with me ever since. It taught me more about connection and the quiet weight educators carry than almost anything else in my career.

“I Don’t Like You. Go Away.”

His voice was sharp and his little face was set. He said , looking right at me.

I had been at the centre for about an hour, sitting in the background while I observed one of my pre-service educators with a small group of children. My job was to assess her teaching, the way she connected with the children and facilitated their play.

The little boy across from me, arms crossed. I had noticed him earlier on the edges of play, sitting a little apart from the others.
There was something uneasy about his presence. I sat on the floor near him, picked up a few plastic dinosaurs, and started to play, giving them voices and letting them stomp and chat. An open invitation, no pressure.

That was when he looked straight at me and said, “I don’t like you. Go away.”

I did not take it personally, of course. What I could see was a little boy for whom closeness felt risky, someone who may have learned that keeping people at a distance felt safer. Attachment theory gives me a lens for noticing this, a way of paying closer attention. It stops well short of letting me label a child I watched for an hour.

So I stayed where I was and kept playing, letting the dinosaurs roar. I said, gently, “I’m sorry you feel that way. I hope we can be friends. It’s safe to play with me.”

He stayed quiet at first. Then he watched. Little by little his posture shifted, his arms loosened, his eyes followed the dinosaurs, and after a while he reached out, took one, and joined in.

The Science of Building Trust

For the rest of my visit he stayed close, near me, watching, following. While I kept my focus on my student and her group, I could feel him settling beside me, minute by minute.

This is what the beginning of trust looks like. It builds slowly and quietly, in a child choosing to stay in the room, in a posture that softens, in a glance held a second longer, in a small hand reaching for a dinosaur. In early childhood, these small moments lay the ground for everything that follows: language, learning, connection, resilience. A child who feels safe can begin to learn, and we see it in the research on stress and the developing brain as clearly as we see it on the mat each day.

Then, as my visit came to an end, something unexpected happened. As I stood to leave, his small hands grabbed the fabric of my skirt and held on tight.


“Don’t go.”



His voice, so firm before, carried an edge of desperation now. The educator gently tried to coax him away and reassure him that I had to go. His little fingers only tightened, and for a moment I felt a lump rise in my throat.

What do you say to a child for whom a goodbye feels this big? I knelt to his level, met his eyes, and reached for the most comforting words I had. “We will see each other again. And the people who care for you are here for you.” I wanted him to feel held, right then.

He stood there as I walked to my car, his small figure framed by the doorway, watching and waiting. And as I drove out of Cranbourne, I started to cry.

What This Means for Early Childhood Educators

Some of the hardest parts of this work sit outside the teaching, the planning, and the frameworks. Sometimes the hardest part is holding children’s emotions and stories. It has been this way for me. That emotional labour, the weight of holding children whose stories we may never fully know, gets far too little airtime in our profession. Here is what that morning reinforced for me.

Rejection is communication. It is a type of behaviour. When a child says “go away,” they may be telling you that closeness feels risky right now. Meet it with steadiness and stay.

What children need is connection. Proximity, consistency and calm are what a child like this reaches for, and staying in the room, gently and without demands, is often the whole of it.

Small moments matter. A child picking up a dinosaur or giving you a look. In the slow building of trust, these are the milestones.

Educator wellbeing counts too. Walking away from a child who is clinging to you is genuinely hard. Naming that, and letting ourselves feel the grief of those goodbyes, is part of practice we can sustain.

A Final Thought

That little boy needed something simple that day. He needed someone who would stay, even as he asked them to go. So often it is the children who push the hardest who are reaching for connection the most. And it is the ordinary Tuesday morning, the dinosaurs, the floor, the patient waiting, that turns out to matter most.