Before the spending freeze many public sector workers could expect some sort of support from their employers in the event of redundancy. The extent of the support varied from one organisation to another, and depended on age, seniority together perhaps with other factors. Now that many is tight, this level of outplacement support may not be available.

So what other support can you get if you are looking for a new job? There are Job Centres of course but they have come in for a lot of criticism recently; they are a resource but should not be relied on as the only one. More pertinent perhaps are job clubs; local groups of unemployed people who provide peer support for each other, work together to improve their CVs, networking and interview skills and share job opportunities with each other. Job clubs are sometimes run by the local council, others are independent. An internet search should tell you where your local job club is.

Alternatively, although employer funded outplacement support may not be available, there is no reason why you should not engage the services of an outplacement company yourself. If personal, one to one support is too expensive, consider joining together with some colleagues and commissioning us at Career Energy to provide you with Job Search workshops. These can be highly cost effective and will give you a head start in the jobs market.

It will take time before the jobs market stabilises. Those who take a pro-active approach and seek out support for themselves are bound to get back into work faster than those who sit back and wait for jobs to come to them. This is not a time to be complacent.

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My first wish is for society to recognise that career planning and long term career management is the culmination of our educational system. We should not have to spend all those years in education only to find that when we come out the other side we simply stumble into the first job that comes along. Nor, for most us, to continue to stumble from one job to another for the rest of our lives. I would like to see career planning integrated into the educational system. Not necessarily at the same time as we leave education, most people need a few years to really understand what full time work is all about, and who they are in their working persona. But a proper career planning process should be made available to all at the right time during their twenties, funded by the state and delivered by qualified career professionals.

My second wish is to get rid of job centres. David Cameron sort of put his finger on it yesterday when he said that job centres should be replaced by local charities, support groups and private companies. He didn’t get it quite right because well meaning charities and support group groups are not necessarily staffed by qualified professionals. But he is on the right track; job centres have been failing for years and need to be replaced by an effective,  professional service. The same goes for Connexions, Prospects and all the other publicly funded initiatives that currently misdirect and ill-advise job seekers and school leavers.

I would like to see common sense in the qualification process for Career Development Loans. At the moment anyone can apply to a bank for government-backed Career Development Loan. For any sort of training, other than career advice. What nonsense! How can one plan a self development  programme properly without effective advice and planning? Career advice should not only fall within the scope of Career Development Loans; it should be a essential prerequisite.

Finally I would like to see a common qualification standard for career professionals. There are some excellent courses out there but there are no regulations as to who can set up as a career consultant. Ours is an emerging profession. It needs to develop. It is vulnerable to cowboys and charlatans. A common standard, backed by an effective professional body (not the handful of self interest groups that currently exist) would make all the difference.

That’s my wish list. Do you think Santa will come on May 6^th?

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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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“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?

Yes, you are right. Its the complacent one about green shoots. And that in a nutshell encapsulates Whitehall’s response to rising unemployment figures. I’m not saying that they don’t care. But I do think that the have no idea what they are doing. They are flailing around.

Take a look at any of the recent announcements about how to deal with the unemployment crisis. You will find a lot of big numbers- billions thrown at this initiative, billions thrown at that. But behind the headlines, there is no detail. I have looked. I have scoured the government websites. there is very little there.

Yes there are all sorts of great slogans. Adult Advancement Careers Centres is the latest, joining Next Step, New Start, etc. And of course Job Centres are going to get loads more money. But Job Centres are failed models, they have been so for half a century. Staff are inadequately trained, employers with vacancies ignore them, nobody really knows what they are for- are they a place for processing benefits, for advertising jobs or for offering practical support to job seekers?

As a private sector provider of career and job search services, it is depressing to see what is happening in the public sector. Career Energy, and other similar professional organisations get outstanding results in helping people back to work. We could do the same in the public sector. But archaic procurement rules and the refusal of civil servants to step outside their comfort zone means that they would rather stick to the same tried and failed solutions, using the same tried and failed providers. What a tragedy.

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Of course the government is responsible for a successful economy and employment is a powerful economic driver. But so too is finance, and government has only recently become involved in that, and then only as a result of crisis. Government’s core role in finance is to regulate and to underpin the sector; not to manage it. The same should surely apply to the job market. There seems to be no prima facie case for active government involvement in directing the flow of labour.

The employment sector has evolved significantly since Job Centres were created. Career professionals are now an established discipline with formal qualifications, who are far more successful than job centres, not just in getting people into jobs, but getting them into the right jobs.

There is major doubt within the career profession about another plank of government employment strategy; the skills agenda.The letter to the Times this week from a group of peers condemning the fact that many people have less than 5 GCSEs and calling for more skills training was wide of the mark and typifies the muddled thinking around the skills agenda. They should have been calling for better education!

An urgent debate is needed over what role, if any, government should play in the job market. My professional view is that it should be no more than a funding and facilitating role; diverting the money spent on Job Centres to enable job seekers to purchase proper, effective career advice and training, particularly in job search skills.

 Job centres could revert to the only function that anyone really wants from them; that of a benefits office. And the skills agenda could be set in context. Once we get the majority of people into the right jobs, where they can use the skills they already have and that they enjoy using, the call for more skills training will dim. And then we can stop spending money on the plethora of bodies that exist to conceal government ineffectiveness in the labour market.

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As they stand, Job Centres belong to a different world. They were fine in an age when each town had a handful of primary employers and workers could be shunted around between them. But they have never adequately catered for white collar workers and even the blue collar recruitment scenario today is too complex for them to deal with. Employers do not use them because they are sent candidates who have not been adequately matched to the job and employees only go there to sign on and qualify for benefits.

Increasingly most people find jobs through their contacts and even the high level recruiters brought in to save the job centres come a poor third behind networking and on-line recruiting as a source of job vacancies. Bringing recruiters in to save job centres is like asking Avram Grant to revive Arsenal’s premiership bid.

The reality is that people need far more sophisticated tools and support in order to find and win jobs. The work we do at Career Energy stands at the forefront of an emerging profession in which successful careers and jobs are treated as an essential part of every person’s life, and as a primary contributor to national economic prosperity and social cohesion. The challenge now is to integrate the work that is still only being done on a relatively small scale by career professionals into a national programme that benefits all job seekers, not just those with the wisdom and ambition to seek out Career Energy and our colleague organisations.

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I wonder whether the ministers and civil servants responsible for employment have ever really considered why companies are reluctant to post jobs in the job centre. Is it because employers know that they are likely to get a string of ill matched candidates who feel as lukewarm about the job on offer as the employer does about them? Job Centres are one of the great unsung national disgraces; until there is a radical shake up in the way that they assist job seekers and match them to the right positions they are likely to never be taken seriously. There is so much more that can be done to improve Job Centres. Will it ever happen?

Which brings us to the ex Woolworths manager. He is right. There are thousands of people of chasing the same job. Which is why he shouldn’t. Like everyone else he has a unique blend of skills and experiences. There are jobs out there which will be right for him and him alone. He won’t find them in a catalogue of vacancies in the Job Centre. He will find them by assessing his unique market place value, identifying the companies and roles that need what he has to offer and networking himself in strongly. Much more difficult than walking into the job centre. But much more effective.

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Over the past couple of years Career Energy has been running pilot projects with ex-offenders and long term unemployed, to help them into jobs. We have been doing things very differently from the conventional, state-funded approaches, and getting outstanding results.

At the core of our approach is the recognition that everyone, even the most intransigent offender, has a unique identity and skill set. They may be wholly unaware of this but which, with the right support, their unique abilities can be identified and developed. At the same time most people would like to have a comfortable lifestyle and money in their pocket, even if they don’t want a conventional job.

The problems that most socially excluded groups face stem from poor education, low self esteem, extreme poverty or disability or sickness. But by engaging with people on a one to one basis we help them to find ways to overcome the obstacles, recognise what they are capable of, set goals for themselves and start to make changes in their life.  What we do, works.

Of course governments have to deal with mass populations and is is very easy to adopt one-size-fits-all solutions. But the problems of the long term unemployed have never been solved and the latest initiative is almost certainly bound to end in failure. It is time for a more personalised approach, to take Job Centres out of the picture and introduce new services delivered by smaller, flexible, providers like Career Energy. It will cost more, but the benefits to the economy will far exceed the costs.

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