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CEIS Ayrshire is focussed on making Scotland a better place to live and work with a more inclusive economy. We support individuals, communities and businesses throughout Scotland with a range of services such as employability, recruitment and retention services, skills and training and more. It is our mission to tackle inequality, strengthen communities and improve the performance and impact of businesses.

Our team has an extensive set of skills that ensures our clients are fully supported for their individual needs by giving access to local vacancies, interview training, obtaining new skills through our training courses and more.

We are here to support our clients the best we can to enter or re-enter employment.

Fullarton Youth Employability Hub.

In March, we launched a 4-week pilot of our Youth Employability Hub, in partnership with North Ayrshire council, for 16–24-year-olds. The programme took the clients though pre-employment workshops including mentoring circles, skills and qualities, confidence building and resilience, CV creation and interview skills and ended with a meeting with local employers.

Following the success of the pilot Hub in March, we just recently completed our second Hub in Fullarton. The group worked well with each other and progressed through the various workshops, gaining confidence and vital skills needed to support them into employment.

As the hub reached its conclusion, we invited local employers, WIFI Spark, Key and BPO to attend the hub and meet the group for face-to-face interviews and clients were encouraged to apply for any positions that were available.

We also had a chance to chat and hear what they had to say about the day.

Key have been providing to support services across Scotland for 40 years. They support people with various needs from mental health to disabilities. They are looking to get the word out there and get more people working in care. We spoke to Lisa Littlejohn who is a team manager at Key, this is what Lisa had to say about the day.

“They’ve all been great, people think that they’ve not worked in care before they’ve not got the experience, sometimes it just life experience they have. It’s just takes us telling them, what you are describing to me is what we require from a support worker. A lot of them have been quite surprised that they have got the skillset.”

Margaret Forester Manages the support team at WIFI Spark and has taken on 5 clients through the Kickstart programme based on CEIS Ayrshire’s recommendations, she wants to make sure that she uses North Ayrshire people to fill the positions that are available. Here is what she had to say about the importance of these types of events.

“You don’t realise what’s out there and the challenges people have, today has been very interesting, there are some young carers there and people that have their own challenges, whether that is being a single parent or having autism. Today has been very good because these people have been very comfortable, they have opened up and told me things that would make me think they are a good candidate.”

BPO Collections are looking to give back to the area by employing local people. They are doing a large recruitment drive and are looking for to 60 full time positions. Jennifer Able from BPO collections had this to say about the importance of the meet the employer’s event.

“I’ve been doing interviews over the last few weeks and this is where I have seen the impact covid has had on some people at critical points of their life where they should be going for interviews and having that face to face experience.  I think this is really valuable, there’s a lot of people who struggle with what that world of work looks like and it’s good to give them an idea of what that looks like and the skills to equip themselves.”

Gillian Moore is a key worker for CEIS Ayrshire and works with 16–24-year-olds. The last 2 years she has been working from home during the pandemic but now she is really enjoying being out and meeting people face to face. Read her thoughts on what the importance of these types of employability hubs are.

“For young people to be able to come out and go into groups with their peers, they’re meeting different people than the people they would normally hang about with. The group that we had was quite a diverse group and they ended up discovering that they could interact with people that maybe they would not normally interact with, I think it helped build their confidence as well, bring them into a slightly more formal setting than they’ve been used to, I’ve seen a huge difference in them from start to finish.”

The Fullarton hub was a great success, and we have our next youth hub starting on the 16^th of June. Our first over 25 hub is also ending soon and we will have more of those to come. These hubs will continue to run throughout North Ayrshire over the next 12 months.

If you would like to know more about our employability hubs, or you are a business and would like to learn more about working with us, please get in touch.