This pilot aims to develop an infrastructure to encourage individuals with higher level skills, i.e graduates from Higher Education and Further Education institutions, that are required to enable the social economy to increase its role in the delivery of high quality services – such as management, IT, marketing, finance skills – to make the social economy sector their career destination of choice.
This pilot aims to facilitate the transfer of knowledge from the higher and further education sector into the social economy by developing a new service to advertise online placement and internship opportunities with social economy organisations for graduates and undergraduates. The platform for this service is the goodmoves recruitment website – an existing social economy business – which has established a customer base of over 1400 social economy organisations and over 4,000 email alert subscribers.
The project will raise awareness of the social economy among higher and further education institutions, promote the development of a higher skilled social economy workforce and test the market for an “added value” element to a recruitment service.
The pilot will undertake the following activities:
Develop the goodmoves website to deliver a placement/internship advertising service
Identify 30 social economy organisations with whom to pilot the new service
Build relationships with 5 universities and 2 colleges to raise awareness of the social economy for work experience placements that are required as part of undergraduate courses or to develop employability skills in students
Pilot the new service from February to May 2007
Promote the new service:
With students and graduates through university careers services, careers fairs and email alerts
With social economy organisations through direct mailings to goodmoves advertisers, through social economy networks and through e:bulletins Organise a dissemination event to discuss learning points
The project has been promoted to the social economy sector through newsletter articles, email shots and adverts in Third Force News. To date we have 14 organisations interested in offering placements and a template has been developed to capture details of the placements for inclusion on the website.
Meetings have been held with contacts in University Careers Services and commitment to advertise placements and the service in the careers centres.
Project staff are collaborating with SCVO colleagues to run a training day on careers in the social economy for members of AGCAS.
Since the last report the goodmoves website has been enhanced to advertise student placement opportunities. A link page has been added to the website with details of the pilot and text has been added to the goodmoves e-mail alert promoting the project to e-mail subscribers. Email distribution group has been created of organisations who have previously advertised jobs on goodmoves and an e-mail has been sent out about the project. An e-mail template has been created for organisations to submit details of placements. Two placements have been advertised and there are 10 others pending. It has been promoted internally to SCVO staff and leaflets included in three mail shots.
We have attended 5 promotional events 3 aimed directly at students (at Glasgow Caledonian, Queen Margaret University and Edinburgh University) and 2 at generic job seekers events. Discussions have also taken place with careers services ar Queen Margaret University, Napier University, Caledonian University and Edinburgh University regarding promoting the project to their students. The development officer has participated in the equal monitoring visit. Promotional display stand has been purchased for the project.
