Unemployed

Introduction

This section provides resources for "making the case" for careers, referring to both challenges that careers services can tackle and evidence that such services work.

Career support for unemployed people is largely dominated by Active Labour Market interventions, and covers career advice focussed on employment outcomes. Community and third-sector programmes also provide interventions in this area. The role of career guidance is less prominent in the literature, though some evidence exists that more holistic treatments, which target both the pragmatic need for work with the individual’s emotional state and wider life context, are frequently needed to achieve sustainable transitions to work. Strong economic arguments have also be provided for returning an unemployed person to the workplace.

This page provides references for the landscape and contextual issues, case studies into practice, relevant research-active institutions, relevant publications, and data sources.

The case for careers

The academic literature and many other publications have cited explicit and implicit arguments for careers investments for this group from a number of perspectives. Amongst the common points made are that:

• Unemployment usually leads to adverse health impacts, which can be both short term and long term in nature (e.g. Brand, 2015).

• Unemployment is associated with longer term detriment to earnings e.g. an immediate 33% earnings loss and as much as 15% loss six years following job separation (Couch & Placzek, 2010)

• Where unemployment is suffered earlier in a career, it leads to a higher probability of later unemployment (e.g. Schmillen et al, 2017, ONS, 2021)

• Unemployment causes an increased chance of family disruption including divorce (Di Nallo et al, 2022)

• Unemployment leads to short and long term impacts on children including lower self-esteem and higher likelihood of grade repetition, dropout, and suspension or expulsion from school (Johnson et al. 2012; Kalil & Ziol-Guest 2005); lower educational attainment (Kalil & Wightman 2011); and lower income of children in adulthood (Page et al. 2009).

• Disruption caused by COVID and technology has led, and likely to lead to, unemployment and the need for more people to move between sectors to maintain economic performance (OECD, 2022).

• People who are unemployed engage less in society and the community e.g. Brand & Burgard (2008)

• High levels of unemployment in the economy make for more difficult trading conditions for businesses, creating a vicious cycle. As unemployment rises in an economy, Okun’s Law proposes that a 1% drop in employment is associated with a 2% drop in GDP (e.g. Marth, 2015).

• Returning an unemployed person to the workplace provided an economic benefit of £39k, in research several years ago suggest values would only be higher today (Public Health England, 2017)

• For more complex cases, careers guidance needs to be part of a more holistic service that accounts for the client’s wider challenges as they can often represent barriers to sustainable redeployment (e.g. De Carvalho, 2024)

• Previous schemes suggest that purely practical help, that does not address the emotional and wider career needs of client, has limited impact e.g. in the case of the New Deal (Blundel, 2004).

Evidence for the benefits of CEIAG in tackling such issues include:

• The users of the UK’s national career service, of whom 2 in 3 are unemployed, report over 95% satisfaction rates with the service (UK Government, 2023)

• Unemployed people participating in interventions in a US study were 2.67 more likely to find work (Liu, 2014).

• Interventions have been found to return up to 85% of unemployed clients back to work within 6 months (Drosos et al, 2021).

• The “What works” unit of the Learning & Work Institute provides a wide range of case studies showing the positive impact of careers support, particularly through the New Futures programme.

NB: We cover the important specific case of Youth Unemployment in a focused brief.