Ms Nuala Whelan:

I thank the committee for the opportunity to give the views of Ballymun Job Centre. Ballymun Job Centre is a community-based organisation providing employment services to local people since 1986. We were established as a community response to the high levels of unemployment at the time. We are a voluntary charitable organisation and manage the local employment services in the Ballymun area. Over our lifetime, we have built relationships and worked at local, national and European levels. We believe the people of Ballymun have the capacity to realise their labour market potential. We want to raise their skills and labour market aspirations and give people choice in terms of the labour market.

It is within this context that Ballymun Job Centre brings its expertise to the Ballymun pilot, as Mr. McKeon mentioned. We see this pilot as an important milestone for the future direction of a national policy on youth unemployment. The lessons from the pilot will, we hope, inform the activation of young people aged between 18 and 24. Ballymun Job Centre is involved in developing the pilot at local level. I will discuss two areas in respect of the expertise we bring to this pilot.

The first is the EQUAL Youth inter-agency network, which was established in 2008 and provides an inter-agency approach to the progression of young people towards the labour market. We are the lead organisation in this inter-agency model and have formal monthly meetings in which our caseload of young people are tracked and progressed. It provides a continuum of seamless service to the young people from guidance through to the workplace.

Our second area of expertise is quality-driven career guidance. We believe this is a cornerstone of any youth activation model. We have experience from a number of projects in which we have developed an in-depth career guidance model, a quality framework on the delivery of guidance to disadvantaged jobseekers and a range of career guidance assessment tools that are online and that we use with our clients. The guidance process involves a very in-depth assessment of the individual's needs and a tailored guidance approach identifying their aptitudes and behavioural style in the workplace. This feeds into the development of a comprehensive career plan that both has a longer-term career objective and short-term career goals. The implementation of this plan is conducted in a very supportive and positive way with the career guidance practitioner within our service. Elements of this model can be implemented either in a group setting or on an individual basis. The outcome of this guidance process is very important for the work we do. We try to help people increase their self-awareness, improve their self-esteem, build career self-efficacy and help them become more resilient in the labour market, therefore providing more long-term sustainable outcomes for young people. We aim to build on both the human and psychological capital of our clients, but the implementation of this type of career plan very much relies on the practitioner-client relationship. It is highly dependent on the skills and approaches of the guidance practitioner within the context of this inter-agency model. It relies on the continuum of this support through education and training and into the labour market.

I have outlined a number of reasons guidance is important. One reason is that it prevents uninformed career decisions. Rather than allowing a client to make a decision to access a training course based simply on its availability in the local area, it provides the client with a more comprehensive way of making decisions about his or her career.

We recognise that there are multiple challenges within the youth guarantee model. It is important to recognise that many people have multiple barriers to employment and some people have very few barriers to employment, so the model needs to be flexible and different levels of support may be required depending on the individual. In Ballymun, we focus on inter-generational and community impact, which results in clustering of very disadvantaged people in certain areas. Therefore, the flexibility of the model is paramount. We want to focus on short-term interventions as well as longer-term robust methods so that people sustain their abilities within the labour market.

In terms of recommendations, we see career guidance as being the first step in any training, education or activation process. It keeps people close to the labour market just by engaging with services and it should form a bridge linking the identified labour market needs of the individual to the programmes that are designed to meet those individual's needs. However, successful implementation of a quality-driven youth guarantee model is largely dependent on the skills and approach of the guidance practitioners delivering that service and the resources put into it.