Employment programmes in the UK are designed to work with individuals to address barriers to work and support people to apply for jobs and transition into sustainable employment, as well as work with employers – both to identify and manage vacancies and to broker the right people into the right jobs.

With this employer facing role often done through dedicated ‘employer engagement teams’, this can mean that multiple employer engagement teams are talking to the same employers in different parts of the country, and that within Contract Package Areas there can be different teams from different programmes trying to engage with the same firms.

Members of the ReAct partnership  – a new, industry-led, active collaboration to support a continuous improvement community in the Restart programme through action research, shared and iterative learning, and the development of applied, evidence-based resources –  have commissioned a project to address two important priorities for the programme:

• To help to develop a shared employer engagement approach, so that employers with jobs across Contract Package Areas can be assured of a consistent Restart offer regardless of where they are creating jobs; and
• To help understand and apply the evidence of ‘what works’ in effective employer engagement more generally – so that we can improve the performance of the programme, and the likelihood of participants finding good, sustainable jobs.

To read the full paper please access this link.