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Response to Redundancy is a government funded initiative to help people who have lost their jobs to find new work. It is aimed both at individuals and at the organisations who are forced to make them redundant. It sounds like a good idea. Yet it seems that many providers of the service are having difficulty finding participants to take advantage of it.

Like many welfare initiatives, the organisations who deliver Response to Redundancy programmes are paid according to the number of people whom they succesfully help to find jobs. So, the more people they can work with, the more they earn. Conversely, if they do not sign enough people onto the programme they do not cover their overheads.

So what is going wrong?

It seems that the main problem is that people do not know about the service. The providers – those who deliver the service- are reluctant to advertise the programme too widely. Their contracts cover a limited geographical area and it is very hard to advertise cost-effectively within a small locality. Government funded schemes like this do not, quite rightly, enable providers to make big profits. So there is an understandable reluctance on the part of providers to spend money on advertising. Instead they look to government to publicise the service.

But government does not seem to be publicising it. Even the direct.gov website, which is the information arm of government does not contain any references to it.

It’s a mess. The recession may have hit suddenly and caught us all off guard. But there seems little point in the public purse being used to fund programmes which suitable candidates cannot access because they do not know about it.

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Tags: Career, Career Advice, Career Energy, career management, Career Planning, job, Job Centres, job search, Redundancy, Response to Redundancy

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 1:39 pm and is filed under Career Advice, Career Change, Career Consultant, Career Energy, Career Planning, Getting A New Job, Redundancy, Uncategorized, outplacement, unemployment . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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