Responding to clients' needs

There is a strengthening focus on customising employment support to the specific needs and situation of each individual client.  This focus on each client’s needs provides the key to developing integrated services and is being built on three key features:

• A comprehensive, in-the-round assessment of individual needs which can be used by a range of services
• The use of ‘account management’ arrangements – that is, employability staff who focus on helping clients create a progressive and integrated way to and through work by joining up the services of a number of organisations.  These can include specialist services (to help clients deal with issues such as debt, homelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, disability) as well as employability services.

• Improved working relationships between these services and a growing recognition that a wide range of services have a significant role to play in engaging and supporting clients on their journey to employment.

This approach is being complemented by the increasing use of ‘co-design’, in other words, employability staff working with clients (individuals and employers) to design both the key features of a service and the way in which it responds to the needs of an individual client or employer ‘see ‘Personalisation Through Participation by Charles Leadbeater, Demos 2004)

A related approach is the self-directed service approach which allocates budgets to individuals who are then in a position to shape, with the appropriate support, the support they need (see ‘Making It Personal’ by Charles Leadbeater, Jamie Bartlett, Niamh Gallagher, Demos 2008)

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