From pilot to powerhouse — how collaboration across councils and regions created a legacy of over 180 trained water industry professionals.

Close to 200 newly qualified Water Industry Workers and Treatment Operators for north Queensland are the legacy of a five-year training program, recently wrapping up in 2025.

The Water Industry Worker Program (WIWP) is a testament to what can be accomplished through industry partnership with a long standing successful Registered Training Organisation (RTO) for regional and remote communities. The WIWP has run over the last five years, from its beginnings as a smaller pilot program and building year upon year, becoming one of the largest-scaled training programs for water industry operations.

From its early days in 2018, North Queensland Councils had identified a need to achieve job security and enhanced in-house skills in their water industry workers, their communities agreed more training was needed, leading to the start of training discussions.

Simmonds & Bristow specialist trainer Liz Millan said the program was a challenge to get off the ground yet has been a personal favourite to see come to fruition.

“I had been talking to Townsville City Council about a Water Industry program since around April 2018.”

“Despite lots of discussions throughout the year for North Queensland training clusters, it amounted to nothing as the councils struggled to consolidate their needs,” Liz said.

The WIWP was the solution that launched the following year, providing Certificate II and Certificate III Water Industry Operations training to five regional councils in North Queensland in its first round in 2019. From there, it grew with a new round of delivery each year until the current program wrap-up in 2025.

The Cluster Model: Making Training Accessible

Water industry training programs the likes of which Liz had been discussing, were nothing new to Simmonds & Bristow. Clustered programs across states were their solution to ensuring small groups achieved training without being restricted to the confines of group sizes.

These programs aimed at creating contained localised hubs in areas that otherwise would not have enough people to run face-to-face training. The combined programs were S&B’s way of cutting travel costs while ensuring individuals didn’t miss out and had been a feature of S&B’s delivery since Liz first started in 2009.

Simmonds & Bristow’s collaboration with the Local Government Association of Queensland (LGAQ) had successfully delivered several clustered training programs to Queensland’s communities, two notable programs being the Burketown Certificate III program run along the Gulf of Carpentaria for Burketown, Doomadgee, Croydon, Carpentaria & Mornington Shire Councils in 2016 comprising of 6 learners, and the Cooktown Indigenous Certificate III program delivered in Cooktown, Wujal Wujal, Hopevale, and Etheridge in 2017 for 11 learners. The programs LGAQ’s collaboration and organisation were vital elements in ensuring such programs could get off the ground.

The Spark of the Idea

The start of 2019 brought with it a spark of renewed interest in North Queensland. Liz was put into contact with someone new.

LGAQ put her in touch with Kellie Lister, the original Queensland Water Regional Alliances Program (QWRAP) and Mackay Regional Council program coordinator who was putting together a pilot program for five regional councils based in the Mackay area for Water Industry Operations training, funded by QWRAP.

“They were looking for a program that could do it all, from entry-level to supervisory, the councils needed nationally qualified operators able to work in multiple areas required by water and wastewater treatment plant operators.” Said Liz.

“I sent Kellie a copy of the work I had proposed to Townsville City Council, and she came back to me with a list of questions.”

“I met with her at the Queensland Water Directorate conference in March 2019 to discuss the pilot program and see if we could get it off the ground,” Liz said.

Launching the Pilot Program

The councils in the original program included Mackay, Townsville, Whitsunday, Burdekin and Cairns and they all roughly had six learners from each that they were trying to get qualified.

A key target was ensuring this workforce would have transferrable skills to be able to provide better coverage across the councils.

The delivery methods and locations would need to rely on the number of learners in the group and the Council’s preferences.

“This also meant that something important to them was ensuring the learners conducted their training on the infrastructure that they would be working on, which was standard practice for us anyway.”

“The compliance obligations also needed to be sorted out early, so we talked about Qualified Supervisors for the learners as well.”

After wrapping up the conversation, Kellie tabled the options to the Council and in April 2019 the tender was sent out.

The process was lengthy, with the submission lodged in early June 2019. Simmonds & Bristow were announced successful on 28 June 2019.

Tender Success and Program Finalisation

Liz went to work with Kellie and the team preparing the delivery and assessment timetables for the program. She travelled up to Mackay in July 2019 to meet with the Mackay Regional Council COO, the Water Manager and Kellie to fine-tune the desired training program with them.

The councils provided the learner names and locations, and Simmonds & Bristow conducted the eligibility checks for funding while finetuning the program to address every participant council’s needs and the availability of the learners.

“I finalized the program with Kellie and Block One Group A’s delivery commenced on schedule on the 2nd of September in Townsville 2019.”

Deliveries of Certificate II and Certificate III were spread around the three main centres of Cairns, Townsville and Mackay, with deliveries and assessments conducted from September 2019 – July 2020 for 9 Certificate II and 10 Certificate III learners.

“At the same time, we arranged and delivered an MRC Water Industry Treatment Certificate III program to 12 MRC learners in treatment specialisations from March – November 2020.”

The pilot program facilitated and delivered by Kellie and S&B was so successful that it was nominated as a finalist in the AWA awards in Oct/Nov 2020. It won, recognised by the Organisation Excellence Award (formerly Program Innovation Award) for the 2020 Regional Water Industry Worker Pilot Program – Mackay Regional Council, Whitsunday Regional Council, Townsville City Council, Cairns Regional Council and Burdekin Shire Council.

Expansion and Success of the Water Industry Worker Program: From Pilot to Statewide Impact

Following the success of the pilot program, Liz and Kellie started working on putting together Round 2, where the list of participant councils grew as word spread of the program’s success.

Another meeting was held by Liz in Mackay with the senior operational team at Mackay Regional Council to revise the unit selections slightly to match updated requirements.

With additional councils involved and overlapping schedules among the Certificate III learners, the decision was cleverly made to split the group into “Northern” and “Southern” cohorts with duplicate deliveries located geographically around each region to minimise learner travel. The resulting Round 2 program delivery increased to 46 learners across eight regional councils.

“We kicked off Round 2 with Whitsunday, Mackay, Burdekin, Bundaberg and Cherbourg councils contributing 11 Certificate II learners; and”

“Whitsunday, Mackay, Burdekin, Townsville, Cairns, Bundaberg, Fraser Coast and South Burnett councils contributed 35 Certificate III learners.” Explained Liz.

The program ran very successfully from August 2020 until July 2021.

“Around March 2021 Kellie contacted us and we started discussing the Round 3 WIWP. At that time, she also facilitated, along with us, setting up a FNQROC WIT Round for treatment plant operators from around the FNQROC group of councils.”

“Once these were well underway, Kellie told us in July 2021 that she was stepping back into other duties and Lee-Anne Willis would act as the Learning & Development Coordinator for MRC going forward.”

The programs continued with help from Kellie “behind the scenes” as Lee-Anne found her feet. From 2021, Lee-Anne collaborated with Simmonds & Bristow and adjoining councils to complete three more rounds of WIW training.

In those following three years of training, 122 more learners completed their Certificate IIs and IIIs in Water Industry Operations, with three more regional councils joining the mix.

As of 2025, the Water Industry Worker program was successfully run by Simmonds & Bristow through each of its five rounds. It has produced 187 operators across 11 regional councils in Queensland, with a better than 90% completion rate, marking it the most successful large-scale program in the State for Water Industry Training.