Cornwall Works 50+

Dott is working with people and businesses to co-create ways to help older people find new work and stay in their jobs for longer.

The good news is we’re living longer. Consequently the workforce is getting older and by 2017 about 34.4% of the workforce is predicted to be over 50. As the demographic of the workplace changes, its provisions for older workers will have to adapt. Working hand-in-hand with businesses and communities, Cornwall Works 50+ will look at all sorts of ways to improve and extend employment opportunities for older people. Its key concerns include how to encourage employers to take on older workers and how to overcome barriers faced by older people wanting to return to the workforce.

Update:

Co-discovery phase:

In this stage, research with the wider community is undertaken focusing and examining the local issue. We work with user groups, particularly local communities, and a wider stakeholder group including service providers and other experts.

We began by designing a series of methods to use across our four locations to engage with local communities.  From our Diagnosis phase, we had found that talking to people directly about ‘work’ and getting ‘back to work’ can alienate individuals who feel they have little chance of working again, but might otherwise be encouraged to volunteer, or help their community in some way. We this in mind, we created the following engagement methods:

The Tree of Talent

We believe everyone is talented at something. Not being employed doesn’t mean you have nothing to offer. We wanted to celebrate people’s talents by creating a ‘Tree of Talent’ for the people of Redruth, and it just so happened to be Christmas!

Our design team dressed as Christmas characters and delivered decorations to local shops, pubs, cafes and community centres. People were asked to write what they were talented at on a decoration, to be hung from a Christmas tree in the centre of Redruth.

The week culminated in carols round the tree, where members of the Redruth Community Choir helped local people sing along. The event gave us the chance to celebrate local talent, in an area where many people told us there are few job prospects. Creating a spectacle allowed people to observe and approach us to ask more, and as a way to start a conversation.

What is your dream job in Cornwall?

With four locations in Cornwall to cover, we decided to visit each and ask a single question. Rather than talking about work, which we found for many, was simply a means to an end, we wanted to understand people’s aspirations and their dreams. We were slightly apprehensive that people would dream so big that they’d have trouble realistically finding work in the area, so we also asked them the qualities were about their dream job that interested them.

We were surprised to find peoples’ aspirations were not as we’d expected, instead of Astronauts, and pilots, we heard people wanting to be farmers, Carers, to do something meaningful, help others. Reasons for choosing professions included: being outdoors, chatting to people, freedom, stress free, being creative, helping others and independence. This quickly creates a very different picture from the traditional image of ‘work’.

Community Reporters

We began to realise that our interventions so far were reaching many individuals, but we might be missing the story from people who wouldn’t feel comfortable engaging. To resolve this, we taught some inspiring people we’d met, interview and listening skills and armed them with a dictaphone to capture the stories of people in the community, who would be reluctant to talk to a stranger.

The audio was loaded into a specially designed ‘Armchair of Advice’ where a listener can sit and hear people’s stories through hidden microphones in a giant armchair.

Learning from Partners

We wanted to understand how Welfare to Work in Cornwall functions from the people who deliver the service, so we invited a key group together for a Partner workshop.

Different providers have different ways of explaining what they do, so to get them all on the same page, we asked everyone to map what they did onto a single service model. This gave us the basis for mapping everything that Cornwall Works delivers in Cornwall, and identify any duplications or gaps in the service.

Working with frontline staff, we explored issues around helping people over 50 to find work and mapped what a day in the life of an advisor looks like, including the most positive and frustrating parts.

Co-Digestion:

Throughout Co-discovery we were aware of similar issues repeating themselves and patterns occurring in the insights we were hearing. Now was the time to stop discovering, and start assimilating the information. There was a natural grouping to the challenges facing people over 50 trying to get back to work. We worked with user and partner groups to understand these, and eventually narrow them down to the six, which would have the most impact if solved. The first six on this list would become the design brief and taken forward into Co-design.

How might we…

1. Provide information about the job market in a more personal way?
2. Help people discover pursuing a new career as an exciting opportunity?
3. Educate employers to the benefits of working with people over 50?
4. Prevent people becoming isolated if they're no longer working?
5. Encourage and support enterprise as a way of working?
6. Support people with health issues who still want to work?
7. Encourage Government procedure to support the needs of people in their 50s?
8. Utilise the large skills base of people over 50?
9. Share the wisdom and experience of people over 50?
10. Help people over 50 to feel really confident about their future?
11. Arrange more flexibility in working for people over 50?
12. Support people to explore work opportunities without loosing their benefits?
13. Help people over 50 to promote themselves as employable?
14. Help people feel comfortable and empowered by technology?
15. Transport people to work more easily?

Diagnosis Phase:

This phase is about setting up the project, diagnosing the issues and building on Cornwall Works success, innovating and improving services for people over the age of 50. We looked at existing research into worklessness in older people, both locally, nationally and internationally.

We started with a splash, with the ‘On the bus for 50+’ event.  Anyone looking for work over 50 was invited to join us on a bus touring Cornwall for a day, visiting inspirational serviceswhich support people to progress back to work. The day finished with an outdoor aerobics session in the centre of Truro, led by Fitness for Life.

Next, we set about understanding and mapping the Welfare to Work provision in Cornwall, which we quickly found is quite extensive!

We met with a variety of these providers: Pentreath, JobCentre Plus, Adult Social Care, CPR Works, Cornwall Neighbourhoods for Change, Working Links, Volunteer Cornwall and the Library to understand the issues from their perspective.

Cornwall Works is Cornwall’s Welfare to Work Strategy and acts as an ‘umbrella’ for much of the Welfare to Work provision in Cornwall, and there is a central Cornwall Works Hub where people can call for advice and support: 01872 355015.

Alongside understanding what was happening in Cornwall, we were keen to learn from best practice examples elsewhere. We arranged to speak to Paivi Tahkokallio from Lapland Finland, where extensive research has been carried out looking at their ageing population. An exchange trip to Finisterre, France was also arranged, to learn from the region, whose culture and geography is similar to Cornwall.

The publicity from the bus event helped put us in contact with a number of people who were over 50 and looking for work. To get started, we arranged to meet with them, individually, over a cup of tea, to have a chat and start understanding some of the issues which individuals were facing looking for work over 50.

We then worked to set the focus for the next part of the project, Inclusion Cornwall identified four locations with high levels of worklessness in people over 50 in Cornwall. Redruth, St Austell, Callington and St Just were picked to give us a broad sample of both urban and rural communities, inland and on the coast.