Thu, 17 Mar 2016 | By Sarah Marquet

FROM APRIL'S RECRUITER MAGAZINE

Previously unsuccessful jobseeker Osama Ahnini told Recruiter: “I was lucky — I just found this [opportunity] by luck.”

Jobless and jobseeking since April 2015, Ahnini’s prospects were not encouraging. He was after a building site-based apprenticeship but had found the search hard going. Then some friends pointed him in the direction of a local Jobcentre. “And then I found this opportunity,” he says. 

The opportunity was an eight-week traineeship delivered by employability and training organisation Ingeus, working in partnership with retail chain Asda.

Ingeus, a large Work Programme provider throughout the UK, first partnered with Asda in 2012 on a small-scale support project. And as part of its commitment to the Movement to Work campaign, in September Asda partnered with Ingeus on a programme to support NEETS (young people not in education, employment or training), giving them employability skills and retail-specific experience that might help them land a role in an Asda store.

In Ahnini’s case, he and his ‘classmates’ will, if they are successful in completing the course and progress to being hired by Asda, help staff a new Sutton store.

Recruiter visited Croydon’s Turn Around Centre, a support and services centre for
young people where the current London cohort of trainees are studying. From a small room at the Centre, Ingeus national account manager Jennifer Dix told Recruiter that Asda’s online recruitment process, which includes psychometric testing, can potentially sideline young people such as Ahnini, who may have no previous work experience.

“A lot of young people who have never worked or who have limited work experience will struggle to get through that process, and so Asda decided they wanted to open the doors to those people, offer training, guidance and experience to get them through the process in another way.

“We’ve got people with backgrounds of homelessness, learning difficulties, and some are just young people who have not passed GCSEs and become a bit stuck and need guidance,” Dix says.

A big part of getting these young people ready for the world of work, before even broaching the retail specifics, such as cash handling, is attitude, adds Ingeus tutor Damian Gregory.

It’s knowing the difference between a “street mentality and work mentality”, he says. The components of ‘work mentality’ — including how to walk, how to talk and what kinds of jokes are acceptable — need to be reinforced constantly, until they become habitual.

In addition, the habit of being early — arriving for a shift before the start time, for example — and understanding that when working in a team environment, what affects one will affect the rest, also must be ingrained in these students.

“And after awhile the trainees begin to reinforce those ideas among themselves too,” he says.

While individual programmes can be tweaked, the trainees will usually visit an Asda store twice, including meeting the store managers, before starting their work placement in week four of the programme.

As well as employability skills such as attitude, the trainees are taught basic level maths and English — to ensure they can count change if a till goes down or replenish stock according to a specific plan — and retail-specific employment skills such as customer service.

And what does it take for a trainee to succeed and get the job? According to Gregory, the first thing is timekeeping. “If you start at 10, get there for half nine,” he says.
“Number two, smile. Smile like you’ve won the lottery. The other thing is be motivated… [the trainees] have to show willingness and that comes back to one of the key things we’ve been looking at with these guys since the start of the course — body language.”
Of course, first impressions are important, and these students may not always put their best foot forward initially.

However, Gregory adds: “A lot of young people who haven’t had much success in life to date are very, very kind of defensive or guarded, or can sometimes react quite badly in group environments or when being told what to do; it’s a defence mechanism, it’s just a barrier. So it’s not that we have to say ‘you shouldn’t be like that’ it’s that throughout the duration of the programme, having that consistent person, the tutor, consistently delivering messages and believing in them, I think that suddenly they relax their defences a little bit.”

That’s where the work experience is key, Dix says: it shows the store managers that these young people, despite potentially not giving a great first impression, are keen and loyal employees.

For trainees who complete the programme but don’t ultimately get a job with Asda, Ingeus continues to its support by either finding them work elsewhere or giving them further training.

And is this current cohort looking forward to starting work with Asda?
“Yeah, I’m excited. Finally,” says Ahnini’s classmate Minha Tufail, who had been out of work and study for a year, a smile breaking over her face.

Ingeus’ Asda traineeship at a glance:

• Launched September 2015 
• Eight-week, full-time traineeship including classroom-based training and in-store experience
• Targets 18-24-year-olds
• Three modules: employability skills, functional skills (maths and English) and retail-specific skills
• Course is run at the equivalent to GSCE grade C
• Asda ringfences jobs, with the trainees in mind, though they need to go through a formal interview process
• 87 have gone through the programme so far, with 38 securing employment
• Funded by the Skills Funding Agency, which operates in England, with Asda providing the young people lunch when they are on shift. Should Asda want trainees in other areas of the UK, Ingeus would outsource to an organisation such as The Princes Trust
• Asda has signed up to the Movement to Work, a campaign supported by large employers that aims to offer opportunities to unemployed youth. Asda has committed to hiring 1,000 such people this year, and has tasked Ingeus with finding and training 600
• Ingeus runs a similar programme with retailer Poundworld.