Welcome to Workplay: flex to work and play
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Women’s sport is tough. We know the challenge is real. Being an elite athlete can present significant hurdles for a lot of women, as they navigate their sporting journey alongside a range of responsibilities that can include training, study, work, and family. That’s why we’ve created Workplay.
AFLW players are highly motivated and driven people. Many of the skills they possess translate into being a great employee. AFLW players excel under pressure, they know how to deliver and time manage, they are high performing team members and they are incredible leaders on and off the field.
Many of these attributes are hard to acquire, success in the sporting arena requires the ability to take on feedback and hone skills for better performance, making AFLW players wonderful potential employees.
AFLW player train and play up to 20 hours a week during pre-season and the home and away season. To balance a non-playing career, flexibility in start and end times is essential to support them to attend mid-week training and games. During the off season, they may wish to increase hours. Each athlete will have their own skillset and flexibility requirements.
Stories and learnings to help AFLW athletes excel at finding the balance between work and play.
Women athletes should be empowered to be their absolute best on and off the field – and that means having access to great career opportunities. Working with John Holland has helped me develop skills and experience in construction and set up an exciting future on projects both big and small. Most importantly, I’ve still got the flexibility I need to train and play my best footy.
Nina has been an incredible addition to the AFL Data & Analytics team. Her passion for data with the added bonus of her knowledge of football has enabled her to have an immediate impact. Despite working with many complicated datasets and new technologies, I have been impressed by Nina’s ability to run with new projects. The qualities required for a professional athlete certainly transfer over to Nina’s role on the Data team – she is always a team player, maintains a positive mindset and she has a strong commitment to excellence. I would highly recommend any future employer to consider AFLW players for their business.
Workplay is a vital platform for us part-time athletes that are working and playing footy at the same time. Everyone needs that external mental distraction so they can refocus on footy when they come back. Workplay enables that – you have your profile, you have a niche, people find you and you’re able to go into the pathway that you can go into and works flexibly for you.
We have an opportunity to be able to grow our skills and excel in a separate part of our lives as well. Workplay creates this opportunity for us and lets companies look at you and your skills and say ‘alright, that’s someone I want to work with.
