New Deal 13 week Course, Skills Training Ltd, Hounslow

Posted on February 24th, 2010.

Post Categories: DWP • Flexible New Deal • New Deal • Welfare Reform • jobcentre Plus • uk government • unemployment
Tags: 13 week course, hounslow, New Deal, new deal 13 week course, skills training ltd

DWP New Deal 13 week Course, Skills Training Ltd, Hounslow

Final Report by Martin Langley to 18/12/09

We have recently received a very long comment from “Martin Langley” which in order to give it justice I have decided to give it a new post! Again, like the “Cocheese” one it is much better than most of my contributions here so it deserves a new post rather than just being a comment!

Abstract

This report documents the author’s experience attending a 13 week “New Deal” training provision for DWP clients at Skills Training Ltd’s offices in Staines Road Hounslow.

Centre management conducts activities under a contract for service provision with the DWP. Clients of varying lengths of unemployment are asked to attend courses to improve
their prospects of securing work.

Centre management do make attempts to provide services in accordance with the SLA, however this seems so badly drafted as to promote clients’ problems rather than abilities, and to perversely incentivise exploitative management practices. Value generated by client effort or ability seems promptly extracted for managers’ personal gain and results in clients emerging from the centre more alienated than when they went in. Comparison with the Soviet Gulag is not entirely unfair.

This senseless waste of the human resource of (often talented) clients and taxpayer money could be remedied by reviewing/redrafting the SLA. We suggest the revision should require professional packaging/marketing of client’s skills and abilities towards real employers, and should incentivise staff and management towards generating honest profits. 

1. Status Quo

The centre provides a range of training/support services to DWP clients intended to facilitate basic employability skills and methods of job hunting for unemployed persons of widely varying employment, social and national backgrounds.

Of its very nature the centre must accommodate clients who are deeply disenchanted, alienated and even abusive, so much staff effort must be directed towards client containment and discipline. In combination with a defensive “box ticking” approach to service provision driven by DWP SLAs, there is little time left for any positive career support or encouragement. Examples of this include:

a. The centre’s lift was defective for several weeks, with disabled clients
having to struggle up several flights of stairs.

b. Beyond an initial “pep talk”, clients are usually left to their own devices
on internet PCs to “job hunt” using job boards and recruitment agencies. These methods are invariably a waste of time and effort and further contribute to clients’ exploitation and disenchantment.

c. Client alienation is reflected in the “embattled” mentality of staff customer advisers who relieve their own frustration through frequent absence.

There are regular presentations provided on the “usual suspects” of cv creation, interview skills and application for “non-advertised vacancies”, but these are never followed through with practical action beyond exhortations to “contact X employers a day”, or “there’s the phone and Yellow Pages, get on with it”. The office environment and staff attitudes are particularly effective at discouraging telephone canvassing of real employers, who now regard cvs etc as so much “junk mail”. There is a well equipped IT training room, but basic skills training in Windows and email is left to the whim of other clients on “work experience”.

Of overwhelming concern, however is the attitude and conduct of staff responsible for client placement with employers. Clients expressing interest in jobs notified to the centre are at best subjected to intrusive and humiliating interrogation, – “how long have you worked in a care home?”, and at worst receive sneers, discouragement or downright abuse. The service provided by the centre in this basic function is so consistently atrocious, and falls so far below any semblance of professionalism as to do more harm than good, and would likely render the company liable in tort negligence if clients only knew their rights. It is probably explained by the exploitation described below.

There is an unhealthy “cronyish” relationship between the centre and a Park Royal recruitment agency who circulate a regular “jobs bulletin”, however when contacted about specific vacancies they advise “send us your cv and we’ll decide if you’re suitable”, before hanging up. It seems this agency occasionally “cherry picks” clients whose placement may be profitable in return for kickbacks to centre staff. Similarly the centre is keen to facilitate “work experience” scams, in which vulnerable clients are subjected to cruel and vicious economic exploitation with implicit DWP approval. Even in the unusual circumstance in which a client finds work in spite of the centre, the company then “acquires” profitable employer contact details, which are seemingly passed on to the agency in return for more backhanders.

To their credit, centre management has responded sympathetically to the drafting of a flyer/mailshot extolling the positive marketing of client’s abilities to small firms, (appendix 1), but suggested target mailing list and contact with marketing staff have failed to materialise. Similarly, a suggested “work trial” for IT support within the centre has gone no further than submission of a cv.

Whilst the above undoubtedly paints a thoroughly dismal picture of the activities at the Hounslow centre, it also belies the good intentions of some staff and management to genuinely facilitate the recovery of clients from redundancy or personal tragedy which has brought them to welfare dependence. Moreover the resources necessary to “recycle” clients back into successful careers are in place, in the form of staff, equipment and expertise, however these persistently fail to be organised and targeted in a manner likely to lead to positive results.

2. Proposed Remedy

The centre’s approach is clearly predicated on a model of the economy/job market based in the 1950’s/60’s. In this a small number of large firms accounted for the overwhelming majority of employment, in which careers were based on long service, loyalty and “good conduct” within the context of a paternalistic business in which competence, performance and flair were often of secondary import. Against this backdrop, centre clients generally do not stack up well, they often have chequered/broken career histories, may be ex-offenders or have drug/alcohol problems. Few of the above employers would risk taking them on and this attitude permeates the approach of the Hounslow centre, with effort being directed to “work trials”, “so we can see if you’re any good”.

This, however is far from present reality. For demographic, economic and legal reasons the job market/economy in 2009 is very different from the above model, with the overwhelming majority of employment being with large numbers of small firms most concerned about a prospective employee’s contribution to profitability rather than the state of his soul. According to this model, centre clients in fact stack up surprisingly well, (see appendix 1). prospective employers have available to them a ready trained, healthy and potentially motivated human resource pretty much “off the shelf”.

In short, the real issue with centre provision is far from a being client problems, it is clearly more to do with marketing, presentation and salesmanship.

Suggested areas of improvement include:

1. Presentations/Telesales, – These are fine as far as they go, with cv and
interview skills being a basic requirement, most importantly, however, the vital point often made that “most real jobs are never advertised” is never followed through!
There is hardly any encouragement given to “cold calling”, the office environment
mitigates strongly against it and there is certainly no effort made to facilitate scripted
telephone canvassing of direct prospects from (e.g.) Yell or Business Link. This
could easily be remedied with modest input from a professional telesales training
firm augmented by clients from a sales background on work experience

2. Workstations/Training room, – As a means of keeping them quiet, clients are
offered access to PC workstations with Job boards detailing “vacancies”
placed by recruitment agancies. These are invariably a waste of time and
effort with clients being forced to “jump through hoops”, fill in tests and submit
details to agencies who seldom return enquiries. The net result is further
discouragement of clients already demotivated. Far more productive would be
the use of “Word” facilities to (e.g.) mailshot prospective employers directly,
by-passing the destructive effect of the “recruitment” racket.

3. Sectorisation/Verticalisation, – At present courses are organised on the basis of clients’ length of unemployment, – X number of weeks unemployed (say). This results in a group having only one thing in common, – they’re all unemployed! Structuring the group in this way automatically focusses attention on client’s problems rather than their abilities. Far better would be to organise a group by (say) experience of Logistics, with fork lift drivers, warehousemen, and packers/pickers being trained as a group. This would facilitate collective effort, (unemployment = isolation!), networking and marketing as a positive force for projects or contracts.

4. Pro-active marketing

(i), teams – Extrapolating from 3. above shows an opportunity to address the job
market/economy on a collective rather than isolated basis. The first questions any
telesales person gets challenged with are “Which company are you calling from?”, and
“What’s it in connection with?”. This is so daunting to an isolated unemployed individual
that as often as not he/she will simply give up rather than face the embarrassment of
answering such interrogation. Calling from a structured team with a business name and
a good sales proposition is very much more likely to encourage the perseverance
necessary for a positive result.

(ii), self promotion – The Internet and its Web design technologies have facilitated
the emergence of websites on which persons with professional abilities in (say)
performing arts can advertise their services directly to prospective clients and include a
portfolio in various media, including images, video or testimonial. Suggesting this for
Skills Training clients is probably a bit ambitious in the first instance but the company
has a website and some means of prospective employers “browsing” available client cvs
would not seem beyond serious consideration.

http://www.atmosphere.uk.com/artists/Perfomance-Sports/Ivan-Souza/580

(iii). Creation of “service products” – Combining elements of the above into a
promotable package is increasingly seen as a convenient method of marketing the
intangible features of service based businesses. A good example is the “Heartbeat”
package from BUPA which is presented as a “new and improved” version of their health
insurance but in reality is simply a re-packaging of existing services. By the same token,
however, a Warehouse manager is much more likely to respond positively to an
invitation to “Our presentation about the Hounslow Logistics Package” than he is to an
individual calling from the jobcentre to “see if you have any driving jobs”.

5. Account Management – in any normal (private sector) marketing organisation, the best sources of continuing revenue are invariably existing customers. They require no advertising spend and call with profitable business by default. It takes effort to overcome inertia and go elsewhere. Of greatest concern in the running of the Hounslow centre are perverse incentives preventing this benefit accruing to clients or employers. In common with their practice of “creaming off” clients with marketable skills, centre management also apparently adopt the practice of “steering” new employers towards agency friends in return for backhanders. This is iniquitous since the benefit of continued contact is removed from clients and seemingly extracted by management in the form of personal enrichment.

In the entire 13 week course not one single existing employer was referred.

In summary, the success of the Skills Training Centre is much more likely to be as a result of a massive change of emphasis to client promotion, marketing and sales methods than any amount of “IT training”, “counselling” or “discipline”. Moreover, feeling part of a properly structured, progressive and above all profitable recovery program is far more likely to enhance clients’ necessary sense of self-worth. All this could be progressed initially as a “pilot project”, involving mailshots, telesales and presentations to prospective employers, in parallel with existing activities.

In respect of the apparent practices of referrring incidental benefits to recruitment agency friends, this is clearly the very worst kind of exploitation of the already impoverished, and is probably consequent on sloppy or nieve drafting of the centre’s service level agreement if not downright bent. In any event this SLA should be reviewed to remove this perverse incentive, and benefit all parties by encouraging “added value”, (e.g.) in the form of the marketing activities outlined above. Not only is this likely to generate more revenues by ensuring all clients are circulated towards real employers, but would also vastly improve morale of staff and clients by refreshing the grubby atmosphere of sleaze and decay which permeates the Hounslow Skills Centre building.

“A good salesman with a bad product will always beat a bad salesman with a good one”.
Martin Langley Bsc(hons)

Admin Note: I see common familiarities between the content in the above report and with my experience and others I have heard of on New Deal. Recommend the solutions/suggestions too!

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One Response to “New Deal 13 week Course, Skills Training Ltd, Hounslow”

1. 1

   

   ExclusiveLeads says:
   

   March 27th 2010 at 8:02 am  

   The Ten Commandments Of Employment… 1. If it rings, put it on hold. 2. If it clunks, call the repairman. 3. If it whistles, ignore it. 4. If it’s a friend, stop work and chat. 5. If it’s the boss, look busy. 6. If it talks, take notes. 7. If it’s handwritten, type it. 8. if it’s typed, copy it. 9. If it’s copied, file it. 10. If it’s Friday, forget it!

   Work is too serious joke a little!

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