Unemployment is Everybody's Business

It's lunchtime and the day job is today's blog; so much for relaxing and using blogfoolery to ensure yours truly deeply madly takes a break. The newspapers are full of stories about people being made redundant, losing their jobs and it is cutting across every sector and every level of position - no matter where you are on the corporate success ladder, it's a long way down from any rung. When I studied business improvment for my MSc, we learned about supply chain management, lean manufacturing and the theory of constraints; well folks when the supply chain breaks down, the food chain isn't too far behind.

We are working to support the newly unemployed, those with their first taste of being in that position of not having a job to go to and the despair that goes along with not knowing how they will deal with the personal financial stuff and not least the emotional impact of loss of status. I have been giving this a lot of thought and while my day job focuses on supporting services that meet the needs of the long-term unemployed, economically inactive and workless within the hardest to reach, hardest to help/vulnerable groups, I an others have realised that unless we act to support those new entrants to the unemployed market, they will very quickly become our traditional customer. Call it the rust factor and unlike a shiny car with all the fancy finishes and warranties and rust proofing and special paint, being unemployed cause the rust to set in very quickly - not months but weeks.

Our approach to the newly unemployed needs to be similar in terms of the skills we need to support them in their job search, stuff like application forms, CV's, interview preparation and the other bread and butter stuff around confidence and self-esteem. However, before we can do any of that we need to go back to business basics and look at how we deal with expectations in a tighter labour market and what the market will or won't support.

This is going to be the hardest thing for many highly, skilled, qualified, experienced to take - the fact that what they had to offer a year ago has become so devalued in the current climate. That reality is going to need to bite PDQ and we are in the era of survival jobs - transferable skills or no transferable skills the biggest leap that many newly unemployed are going to have to take is that work will mean minimum wage or just above, limited progression routes, unsociable hours/shift patterns and perhaps boring repititive work.

Working with people already devastated by losing their job and all the other personal sense of worth accoutrements that go hand in hand with having a job, will be a tough enough job for those of us working to support them; selling the new labour alternative (pun maybe a wee bit intended) is going to take more work.

So there you are that is the punch in my lunch for today. We need resources to work with our traditional client group and we need additional resources to work to prevent major inflows into long-term unemployment. Unemployment, it's coming to a dole queue near you.