Problems with your employer
You can contact us if you are having problems with your employer.
The types of problems we can help with include:
- your employer is not supervising you properly
- you are not allowed to leave work to attend your training course or not getting sessions with a workplace trainer or assessor
- you are not given time to complete assessments
- you are only getting low-skilled work to do
- your employer isn’t meeting their obligations in your training contract
Call us on 1300 722 603 from 10:00 am to 4:30 pm, Monday to Friday or email at vrqa.apprenticeships@education.vic.gov.au.
If you are under 18, your parent or guardian can call on your behalf. Your Apprentice Connect Australia Provider is also a good source of advice if you are having problems.
If you have problems with workplace safety, bullying, harassment or exploitation, hazards or physical safety contact WorkSafe. If you don’t think you are being paid the correct wage, contact the Fair Work Ombudsman.
Protecting you from harm
Resolving and investigating problems
If you need more help with a problem, our job is to protect you from harm. We can investigate a problem and make sure your employer is doing what they are legally required to do.
If you and your employer cannot agree on how to fix a problem, it can become a formal disagreement called a dispute.
Types of disputes include:
- an apprentice and their employer do not agree to cancel their training contract
- the threatened dismissal of an apprentice or trainee
- an apprentice, trainee or employer is not meeting their training contract obligations
- about competency-based completion.
To resolve the dispute, our authorised officers may visit the workplace and interview the people involved.
If you and your employer cannot resolve your dispute, we may need to decide what to do.
If there isn’t enough evidence to decide, we may have a meeting with the people involved. This will allow us to get more information to help us decide.
You and your employer can resolve the dispute through negotiation at any time.
If you have an unresolved dispute and your employment ends, you can ask us to consider it. You must do this within 30 days of the end of your employment.
Making a complaint
We also investigate complaints about employers or apprentices and trainees.
Complaints are different to a dispute.
Complaints can be from:
- current or former employers,
- apprentices or trainees
- third parties.
You can find out more information about how to make a complaint and how we handle complaints.
How we protect you from harm
You can find out more about how we protect apprentices and trainees in our compliance and enforcement framework.
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