Growing the Social Economy with Graduates – Developing Business

Key Contact: Linda Gillespie

Address: 30 George Square, Glasgow

Telephone: 0141 248 5479

Email:Linda.gillespie@bg-glasgow.co.uk

Web address: www.bg-gateway.com

In a nutshell

We are Business Gateway in Glasgow. We managed the ‘Growing the Social Economy with Graduates’ pilot This involved us in placing recent university graduates in social economy organizations where their skills were needed. Graduates helped organizations produce business plans, devise marketing strategies, and set up web sites. This also gave graduates the opportunity to gain work experience and confidence in their own abilities.

This work was part of the Social Economy Scotland (SES) programme. SES was a Development Partnership funded by the European Community’s EQUAL initiative.

What the issues were?

There were three key issues;

• Social enterprises don’t generally have the time and staff to do essential pieces of work around business development which would help their enterprise to grow. Nor do they have the money to pay for consultants to do those pieces of work;

• University graduates don't see the social economy sector as a career choice;

• University graduates often lack experience and confidence to use their skills in the work environment

What we did

The idea for the pilot came from one of our previous projects in which an accountancy graduate supported the introduction of a software accounting system. This involved over 30 young companies all of whom were less than 3 years old. We realized this was a good model to try with social economy organizations and that it could be extended to include a much wider range of business skills such as marketing, ICT and business studies.

Organizations were selected to take part in this through a detailed review of their business. This helped us to clearly identify their needs and prioritize those needs. We believed many of the needs could be easily solved with the right kind of help. Some needs would be quick to solve, others would take a little longer.

We arranged both short and long-term placements to respond to different needs.  We used an existing Scottish Enterprise programme – Graduates into Business to recruit the graduates for this project. They used a range of activities to attract the graduates:

• presenting to targeted university departments;

• going to graduate employment fairs;

• liaising with university careers services;

• advertising in the national press.

The graduates received project management training before being matched and placed with an organization. Six graduates were placed in social economy organizations on a short term basis, (less than three months per placement), supporting 64 projects within 42 organizations. Ten graduates were recruited to support ten organizations on a long term basis (up to six months in one placement).

They then received support when they were on their placement from our business advisors and client managers. Monitoring visits were used to see how the graduates were getting on. At the end of each placement there was a review of progress and an evaluation of what had been achieved.

Our outcomes

The work exceeded everyone’s expectations, including ours, the organizations and the graduates. Over 83% of the organizations we worked with said that the graduates’ standard of work was of high quality and completed on time.

Graduates helped:

• Alcohol Focus Scotland improve their income generation through better marketing of their services;

• Glasgow Mentoring Network (GMN) develop an access database that allowed GMN to store information about both mentors and trainees.

• Scottish Throughcare & Aftercare Forum produce a fully revised business plan.

The graduates all went from the placements to full-time employment and felt that it was their work experience which had given them the added edge in the recruitment process.

One great thing – everyone wins

Both sides benefited – a win-win situation for everyone:

• graduates gained experience in a sector which they had never considered as a career. This helped them get full-time employment;

• social enterprises got free up-to-date business skills, from new graduates, which otherwise they would have been unable to afford.

Lessons learnt

We learned that:

• if we are going to encourage graduates to work in the social economy we need to make them more aware of the opportunities;

• social economy organizations need to be proactive to recruit graduates rather than expecting graduates to come to them;

• social economy organizations can encourage graduates by offering a graduate recruitment programme;

• the greatest demands were for Human Resource and ICT support. There are clear gaps in the market here and an opportunity for social economy organizations to provide services to other social enterprises.