Eight brand new social housing units have been built near the CBD

Construction on the $2.22 million social housing renewal project finished recently and gave 50 TAFE NSW students the opportunity to work on a job site.

Through the partnership, local pre-apprenticeship construction students worked alongside tradespeople and supervisors to help build the homes on Short Street.

Member for Dubbo Dugald Saunders believes helping the students learn new skills was a vital part of the project.

"This is a really important part of this project. The cooperation between the housing corporation and TAFE NSW, part of that has been some pre-apprenticeship training for all sort of different skills," he said.

"So whether it was concreting, bricklaying or in this case most of the crew has been involved with the carpentry course."

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Mr Saunders is hopeful the project can help lead to jobs for the construction students.

"These fellas are all from Wellington," he said.

"So again they've been involved in a different perspective where there was real work happening.

"This hopefully will lead to some real opportunities of employment for them."

Scott McLeod from TAFE NSW explained just how much work the students actually were able to do on the site.

"Basically as Dugald (Saunders) said we started with a three bedroom home," he said.

"After the demolition we brought our trades in as you would with any normal project.

"Where the TAFE side of things came into was we ran our courses and then ran a pre-apprenticeship course.

"The guys came on site and engaged with contractors that we had on site."

Mr McLeod said the organisation helped the students get in touch with local contractors with one student already securing a job as a landscaper.

"They helped them do some of their jobs and to get the skills and experience of doing concreting or rendering and different things like that,"

"Once we saw what some of the guys were capable of then we used our contacts within the local area to place them with different contractors to see if they can gain employment.

"We've had over 50 students through the site during the course of the project."

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