Employment FM
About Employment FM
Employment FM is a 3 year project to assess the value of community radio training in improving the speaking and listening skills and employability prospects of young people. Funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and coordinated by Radio Regen, the project has been delivered as a collaborative partnership by a number of organisations based in Scotland and the North West of England.
The project aims to:
- provide evaluated radio and employability training to several groups of mainly disadvantaged young people, aged 16-19.
- build links between employability providers and community radio stations
- develop models of training and evaluation that can be used to improve employability provision for young people
The project has demonstrated that radio training moves young people closer to employment, as well as into actual employment. 83% of participants showed significant improvement in their employability skills, and all showed significant improvement in communication skills.
“I didn’t realise how much they’d enjoyed it until there was a parents’ forum and I was stopped by three parents, and they thanked me saying that their children loved the radio station, it’s the best thing they do, they talk about it non-stop”.
Sangeeta Shakos, Salford Pupil Referral Unit teacher
Resources
Employment FM Handbook – provides practical guidance to enable community radio stations and partner organisations to deliver similar employability training projects.
Course development tools: Course structures (docx) which breaks down courses delivered as part of Employment FM, and Course builder (xls) which lists learning outcomes and enables mapping to other course frameworks.
Flyer for partners (such as schools), showing value of employability work – 4 page A5 booklet, or for embedding in email.
SHMU Trainee handbook, which is a contract between SHMU and their trainees. SHMU is a key Employment FM partner, and has been running an exemplary employability programme in Aberdeen since 2008.
Evaluation handbook (docx) – including the evaluation tools used in Employment FM and guidance on their use.
Teaching resources
Facilitation techniques – a range of activities that could fit into a variety of courses, and which build specific skills.
Complete employability course: A 30 hour course, developed prior to Employment FM with funding by AGMA (Association of Greater Manchester Authorities), taught over two weeks – 3hrs per day, 5 days per week. The course is fully available to download (through links below), and to use or adapt for your own purposes. We simply ask that you credit Radio Regen and the Community Radio Toolkit if you do so. We’d also love to hear your feedback on how you found the course to deliver or adapt.
We also have activities and resources linked to all the courses (and qualifications) in Employment FM – please get in touch with Radio Regen if you’re interested in these.
Employment FM podcasts
Below are two sample podcasts from Employment FM – see(hear) more at: https://soundcloud.com/radioregen/sets/employment-fm.
- How Community Radio Training boosts employability: a short overview of what it is about radio that is so useful for developing employability skills
- SHMU Employability Training: A ‘deep dive’ into the work of SHMU in Aberdeen, who have developed an employability training programme which positions them as a leading employability provider in their area and which provides a significant and sustainable income for the station.
Supporting organisations to deliver employability training
A key aspect of Employment FM is helping other community radio organisations to think about setting up an employability training programme, or enrich the employability training they provide. To this end, we have run a number of events and workshops, exploring the strategic value of this work, and sharing what we’ve learned about how to do it most effectively.
A 2-day workshop was held in SHMU in January 2018, bringing together five community radio stations, to develop their employability training action plans.
We also ran a series of webinars covering different aspects of employability training:
- Overview of employability training [video]
- Delivering training: tips & tricks [video]
- Evaluation [video]
- Recruitment & working with young people [video]
- Funding & partnerships [video]
We have also worked at a strategic level, engaging organisations who could commission such employability work.
If you are interested in finding out more about any aspect of this work, please contact cormac [at] radioregen [dot] org.
