Project: City and Islington College Response to Redundancy

This tailored package of free support allows employers to ease the burden of redundancy, enabling them to offer support to staff under notice. Training and employability skills are also offered to individuals, helping them to realign their abilities with the current labour market and progress into new employment.

Project feature

City and Islington College leads a consortium of partners to deliver the Response to Redundancy service across Central London. This initiative is directed towards employees under threat of redundancy, employers making redundancies and individuals under notice or made redundant in the previous six months. The service offers help and support for retraining and realignment of skills, via bespoke packages, with the objective of getting recently redundant people back into the workplace more quickly. The support covers the Boroughs of Islington, Camden, Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea, which equate to the Jobcentre Plus boundaries for Central London. In addition to a strong group of partners, including further education (FE) colleges, stakeholders include Jobcentre Plus, Nextsteps and the LSC.

The types of free support that can be accessed include:

• information and guidance
• executive outplacement programme for senior managers and highly skilled professionals
• one-to-one career and life coaching
• vocational training and employability skills for staff under notice
• flexible assessment, consultancy and delivery, on- or off-site
• skills scans of staff going forward
• free or subsidised training for staff going forward to address skills shortages.

The strength of this project lies with the huge range of opportunities offered by tapping into the combined resources of some of the strongest FE colleges and providers in London.

City and Islington College’s experiences of supporting the first tranche of participants highlighted the need for the programme to be adapted to the needs of the significant numbers of professional people experiencing redundancy, many of whom were working at a high level in the City, law, architecture, human resources and recruitment. Therefore an outplacement programme for executives was developed, with the possibility of accredited provision in areas such as PRINCE2, and IT training support, e.g. web design, SAGE, MS Office.

The next tranche included middle and junior managers. This group required different resources and new links to employers. ‘High flyers’ generally know where to go for work, but did need assistance and support from their peers to find out that they are not alone and to build their confidence. Some were successful in finding new employment and many still return to the college for ongoing support, citing the support given to them through this emotional process.

City and Islington needed to be creative in its marketing and recruitment and so developed an extensive, continually evolving advertising plan using sites such as Monster.com and mailshots to current learners at the college. In addition, the R2R team visited Jobcentres, held briefings during staff meetings at affected companies, and also attended compulsory group interviews with potential clients, handing out leaflets and referral details.

In terms of the overall offer from the consortium, R2R is marketed as a joint enterprise, and a pamphlet is available which summarises the joint offer. However, each college also summarises its own offer, which may be in a specialist area: for example, Springboard UK focuses on catering, front of house, hospitality, and has expertise in developing employer links within this sector, while Westminster Kingsway offers SIA licences (security industry) and has excellent employer links within this area of work.

Each college has its own advertising campaign for recruitment: for example, City and Islington College made full use of its excellent reputation to ensure that potential learners were all aware that they were the only FE college in London to be judged by Ofsted as outstanding on every measure. Although each college manages its own advertising campaign, all will cross-refer clients so that no-one wishing to take advantage of the scheme is turned away. To ensure that potential clients are directed to the right service, each one receives a training needs analysis which draws out confidence and skills-based gaps, unidentified skills, and develops a training plan. If the client then requires a course not offered by the consortium, the client can be helped to develop and present a business case to Jobcentre Plus.

Case study:

Fiona had been a senior project manager with a large advertising agency, and had vast experience of interviewing and employing staff, but she recognised that she had to prepare herself for being on the other side of the interview desk.

‘This course offers everything you think you know, but really you don’t, about how to motivate yourself to get back into the workplace,’ she said. ‘It is full of valuable things that you have forgotten about and need reminding of, like preparing your CV, networking and interview skills. The competition for jobs is fierce and you need to do everything you can to give yourself the best chance possible.’

Ivan, who had been head of research and development for a large media organisation for ten years, said: ‘If you have been working for a large company for a long time you almost become institutionalised. You are not necessarily at the top of your game and that is where you need to be to deliver again in the jobs market. This course has been absolutely invaluable. The minimum it has achieved is to counteract the stress you feel when you have been made redundant which could sabotage your future employment chances.’

Contact details

David Joseph, Business Development Manager
City and Islington College
The Marlborough Building, 383 Holloway Road, N7 0RN

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