They might be qualified, committed and keen to work but newly arrived refugees face significant barriers to work – the “catch-22” of needing Australian experience to find employment but requiring employment to gain that experience.

Between November 2015 and July last year, Australia resettled an additional 12,000 refugees from Syria and Iraq in a one-off program to help people displaced by long-running civil conflicts.

Those refugees – additional to Australia’s annual humanitarian intake – have mostly settled in western Sydney, and, overwhelmingly, have found a positive resettlement experience. They have told researchers of their gratitude to Australia for accepting them, and reported little experience of racism.

Those in the group:

Were split 50-50 between Iraqi and Syrian nationals

Were young (one-quarter were children, and most aged between 18 and 44)

Were well-educated and with good English

Were mostly Christian (more than 80%, despite Iraq and Syria being overwhelmingly majority Muslim)

Were middle-class and professional (the group included dentists, engineers, pharmacists and business people who had held senior positions with multinational companies in their homelands)

Had a high level of female employment

Were in large family groups with typically three to five dependent children

But the refugees have difficulty finding jobs in Australia, particularly ones commensurate with their skills and experience.

After 18 months in the country, just 17% of humanitarian entrants are in employment, a Centre for Policy Development report found last year. And longer term, less than 50% of skilled and qualified refugees find work in their area of expertise and experience.

Several initiatives, such as Refugee Talent, founded by Syrian refugee Nirary Dacho, and Thrive Refugee Enterprise, have sought to give refugees an entry into the workforce or assistance to begin their own business.

Dacho told the Guardian he had more than 100 unsuccessful job interviews before he decided to start his own firm, connecting refugees with employers looking to hire them.

Prof Jock Collins, from the University of Technology Sydney has begun a three-year study of families resettled under the special Syrian-Iraqi intake, and said employment was the biggest barrier to those families’ resettlement.

“Their biggest worry is finding a job,” he said. “There are two key employment issues: the recognition of qualifications, and the catch-22: they need Australia employment experience before they can get a job in Australia, but they first need that job to get that experience.

“They come here and they want to work, they are impatient to work. Both men and women, have had very successful careers … Some of the men were almost in tears when we interviewed them about just sitting at home. They want to get off the dole as quickly as possible, they want to work.

“From the Australian end, how do we provide Australian experience? We need to think a little bit innovatively about that.”

But Collins said the 200 refugee families were overwhelmingly positive about being in Australia and “hugely grateful” for the chance to rebuild their lives in safety. “Rarely did anyone mention any experience of racism, it didn’t come up.”

The New South Wales coordinator general for resettlement, Peter Shergold, said the state had accepted more than half of the additional 12,000 cohort, in addition to its regular refugee resettlement program.

“We we almost tripled the number of refugees in 2016-17, from 4,500 to 11,200, and on the whole it went effectively and it went ahead without a great deal of media controversy, and it does demonstrate we do have the capacity to take larger numbers of humanitarian migrants in response to global humanitarian catastrophes.”

Shergold said the concentration of refugees moving to one local government area – a majority moved to Fairfield in western Sydney, largely because their sponsors lived there – had put intense pressure on services in that area, and future settlement cohorts would benefit from moving to rural and regional Australia.

“In many of those regional centres, there is goodwill at a community level, there is employer interest, and affordability of housing. There are significant advantages.”

Writing in a public health research and practice paper published by the Sax Institute, Shergold said employment – particularly one that recognised qualifications and experience – was a cornerstone of successful resettlement and integration into Australia.

A total of 2,200 refugees have gone through the NSW Refugee Employment Support Program, which offers language and skills training, assistance with having qualifications recognised, work experience and mentoring.

Through another program Shergold implemented, the NSW government has hired 80 refugees in positions in the state’s public service.

“That was one of my first moves, a program that the NSW government would take on recently arrived refugees, not that they would make their lives as career public servants, but in six or 12 months’ time, they could, if they wanted to, seek jobs in the private sector, and they would go with references, with work skills, with that experience in Australia.

“But none of them have left,” Shergold said. “They don’t want to go back to welfare, they want to work, and they’ll take on even relatively junior-level positions and see that as a first rung on the ladder.”