| Career Development And Change Advice Blog |
| Career Advice, Job Search, Redundancy and Career Change |
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. (more…)
Compare these two statements, taken from the BBC web site:
“I’m not saying green shoots or anything like that by any means but I am saying that whilst we have not reached the bottom, the rate of decline appears to have slowed”
“Unemployment is the country’s number one emergency and the government must use all possible means to address it.”
Which one was made by a government minister? (more…)
Earlier this week the government announced that it was overhauling Job Centres to make them more relevant to managerial and executive staff. Part of this strategy is to including co-opting recruitment consultants to help out. I have argued before that Job Centres are an outmoded institution; neither employers nor employees have faith in them and an overhaul needs to go far beyond drafting in unqualified sales people from the recruitment sector. But the underlying question is, should government be involved at all in the job market. And if so, how? (more…)
The government will announce today that specialist recruitment firms are being called in to help job centre staff to place unemployed professionals and senior managers into new roles. The Employment Minister is quoted as saying that job centres are “dealing with people who haven’t presented before”. That is certainly the case. Which is why the solution is not a quick fix using a hurriedly drafted group of recruiters (who only have a limited number of jobs at their disposal) but a thorough and radical overhaul of state funded job seeker provision to bring it up to standard. (more…)
Watching the TV news can be a depressing experience for an old careers consultant. Two remarks last night brought that home to me. The first was the Prime Minister encouraging employers to notify the Job Centres of their vacancies. The other was a former manager from Woolworths, now unemployed, complaining about the competition for jobs; in his words thousands of people are all going for the same job. In the words of the Pete Seeger song: When will they ever learn? (more…)
The government yesterday announced measures to tackle unemployment and increase the responsibility of those on benefits to return to work. Benefit sanctions will be introduced for those who who refuse to attend Job Centres. But will these measures work? Indeed, do Job centres work? Or is the whole approach to the long term unemployed, and other socially excluded groups, misplaced and bound to fail? (more…)