Rob Gray, Senior Project Officer Helpful approaches to securing and maintaining employer involvement and providing support for young people Rob Gray, Senior Project Officer

Introduction NIACE: Works to ensure all adults can learn throughout their lives Area of work: Supporting the provision of training for unemployed adult learners Project: Researching helpful approaches to working in partnership with employers to support young people for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS)

What the project involved Survey of learning providers In-depth research interviews with partnerships whose survey responses appeared helpful Analysis of findings Report publication

What are the needs of young people? It is very rare for a single provider to be able to address the multiple needs of young people which can include: workplace familiarisation needs; vocational skills needs; maths and English needs; low or no qualifications; ICT skills needs and no access to the internet; lack of confidence and/or motivation; employability skills needs; and personal development needs.

Working in partnership enables: partners to focus on the roles they are best at; different elements to be delivered in a joined up way through a shared vision; new and innovative approaches to be developed; economies of scale to be secured; and offers a boost to the momentum of services in the area.

The range of work undertaken by partnerships Partnerships were offering all the components of support necessary to bring the young people they engaged to work readiness and then to sustain them in work. Some partnerships set out to help young people with complex needs who were much further from the labour market. To bring these young people all the way to work readiness meant a much longer learning journey and required informal learning/ personal development activities thereby involving more partners with the expertise to provide these activities.

Identifying employer partners Most of the partnerships we spoke to made approaches to employers they deemed potentially able to help sourced from sectoral intelligence market research, labour market information (LMI) and business intelligence gathered through networking. Partnerships sought to engage more employers through: hard copy marketing materials such as leaflets and newsletters web descriptions; and advertisements in the trade press, radio and television.

But not all employers could be reached this way, therefore partnerships also: networked with other businesses; worked through business organisations worked through clubs, faith groups, and community organisations; used social networks; cold called; set up stands at trade fairs and events; and worked through intermediaries such as Jobcentre Plus, industry associations, sector skills council networks, banks, accountants and licensing and regulatory bodies.

On contacting an employer, to secure their involvement, partnerships found it helpful to: use employer voice success stories; identify how recruitment can meet each employer’s business needs; identify the CSR benefits; offer recruitment process support; offer wage subsidies in a strategic manner; use the ASB to cover the costs of pre-employment training; signpost employers to other financial support; and require the recruitment of young people through Section 106 agreements within the planning process.

Individualised support for each young people was widely incorporated to: assist and thereby retain the young person; tackle issues that could be problematic in the workplace; and once in the workplace, provide additional forms of support that the employer could not provide themselves. Individualised support enabled partnerships to encompass a wider range of young people and introduce them to the workplace at an earlier stage.

Once in work, in addition to intensive workplace supervision individualised support was provided through: employer based mentors; workplace buddies; skills provider trainer/assessors; and personal advisers from a range of partner organisations including specialist organisations where young people had additional needs.