The Intermediate Labour Market (ILM)

Our oldest, and perhaps best-known, programme is the Intermediate Labour Market or ILM. The ILM provides unemployed people with up to a year’s paid employment delivering socially useful activity. Over their time on the ILM, participants receive vocational and general employability training and support in developing the skills they need to find and keep a job. The ILM not only helps the unemployed to gain the skills and experience they need to enter the labour market: but also contributes to the wider regeneration of disadvantaged communities through activity such as:

• Environmental improvement projects
• Energy efficiency and advice activity
• Home safety and security services
• Community recycling
• Care and childcare.

Employer Led Programmes

We also deliver a range of demand-led programmes, designed to respond to sectoral labour shortages that have been identified by employers. These projects deliver specific job skills to unemployed clients and then place them with a host employer for a short period of work experience. The client is then supported by our Employment Consultants to convert this placement to a job.

These programmes include:

• Working for Health, an employment training programme targeted at support positions within the NHS
• Call Centre Training
• Social Care Programmes
• Administration Training
• Classroom Assistants Programmes.

Specialist Client-Focussed Provision

Over our twenty-two years of operation the nature of our client groups has changed, in line with the economic context in which we work. As unemployment across the UK has fallen those who are left out of work tend to be those individuals who face the biggest barriers to employment. Our response has been to develop a range of specialist programmes that are tailored to the needs of our different target groups, and employ staff with the specific expertise to assist them. These include:

• The Compass Project, based in a series of GP’s surgeries in Glasgow this project provides employment advice and support for workless individuals, targeting particularly those out of work for reasons related to health or disability and those on Incapacity Benefit.
• Assign, which provides pre-employability training and mentoring for Glasgow’s new asylum seekers.
• WiseMove, an employability project targeting people who are homeless or moving on from substance abuse.
• Life Coaching, a specialist ILM which provides training and work experience for ex-offenders who work to provide mentoring and support for newly released ex-offenders considered to be at risk of suicide.

Programme Management

The Wise Group successfully manages a range of large scale Jobcentre Plus and DWP programmes across Scotland and the North East of England including:

• New Deal for Young People, we are the main provider in Glasgow where we improved the combined performance of NDYP options from 39% to 60%.
• New Deal FTET Option in Lanarkshire and East Dunbartonshire, where we have increased the performance of FTET from 50% to 76% in just six months.
• New Deal for Disabled People, we hold contracts under the name of Workable across Scotland and the North East of England. Currently 47% of our registered clients are moving into work, with 60% sustaining work for at least 13 weeks.
• Employment Zone, our Glasgow-based Zone is currently the best performing Multiple Provider Employment Zone in the UK, moving 48% of starts into jobs, almost 20% more than the national average.
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