For the first few weeks of this year I’ve been busy trying to create a jobs service for housing association residents in Birmingham. And it hasn’t been easy. Here is a post about what I’ve been upto.
One of my day-to-day clients at Meshed Media is Trident Housing Association. I’ve been training a team of staff from the Future Jobs Fund in digital media skills. The idea is that they will then use these skills to help the residents of Trident House, many of whom have limited computer skills, and often poor literacy, social problems and severe financial constraints.
Job centres are set to be shut down (as far as I know) leaving online portals as the main route for jobseekers to find work. This is all well and good for the tech savvy, internet aware generation of literate 20-somethings.
But what about the people I’ve met at Trident House? Most of the people in the tower are unemployed, and will therefore rely on these online jobs sites, but some of them (as I have witnessed personally) don’t even know how to operate a mouse.
The solution I’ve been working on is to provide an online jobs portal backed up with real-world support and analogue methods.
Myself and the Digital Village team conducted a survey of residents to find out what jobs they were looking for and where. This information was then used to create an online resource, which was ultimately derailed by technical issues.
Version 2.0, however, is proving more successful. I’ve created Tumblr blogs for each job sector (such as retail, IT, customer service, etc). The team were then tasked with tagging jobs with the Tumblr bookmarklet to populate the blogs.
Knowing that accessibility to so many blogs would be an issue, I set up a Netvibes page which collected all of the Tumblrs in iframe tabs, so all the latest jobs could be found from one source. This, I hope, has sorted the online aspect of the service although it relies on staff time to tag jobs (automation is perhaps an option here, but I prefer the idea of the stream being filtered for the needs of residents).
To back this up I’ve designed posters which will be printed at the end of each week detailing how many new jobs in each sector are up on the Netvibes page. There will be tear-off tabs so people can take the url away with them or use it in the free computer rooms.
I also intend to continue to gather data with surveys and suggestion boxes so the service can match the residents’ expectations.
The service is just being put into action and I hope the residents will start to find it a useful resource when looking for work and a helpful step towards becoming internet proficient at a time when those skills are becoming increasingly necessary to operate in the modern world.
Nice work mate, Chris told me a bit about this at the weekend. I like the idea of feeding everything back through an analogue noticeboard loop!
Was just having a click round that Netvibes page and it looks like the Jobseekers links take you to a search page not the actual job. Does the user need to be logged into it first?
Thanks Dan! The links up there at the moment are old test ones, it’s starting to be populated from now on. Hopefully it will work ok, but certain sites don’t allow direct linking from third-party pages. We’ll see how it goes and make a safe list I guess.
I quite like the analogue element too!