The Mid Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce is offering a free gateway service for businesses in the region that want to access the Government’s ‘Kickstart’ funding scheme to employ young people.
MY Kickstart will help local businesses create additional 6-month job placements of 25hrs/week for 16-24-year-olds where the government will reimburse the business for the young person’s wages whilst they are on placement. This is equivalent to several £1,000s of funding per jobs created.
The young person receives employability support and coaching during the placement period, and businesses receive £1,000 per placement to cover costs such as uniform, computer equipment and supervision.
A service developed to meet local business needs
The national Kickstart Scheme was announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, in his ‘Plan for Jobs’ summer statement to support businesses through the economic downturn and help young people to access good jobs in this challenging period. However, to apply directly for funding, businesses must be offering more than 30 job placements. MY Kickstart, on the other hand, is a service that allows smaller businesses to get involved, allowing them to offer a lower number of placements via a gateway service.
Martin Hathaway, managing director of the Mid Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce says: “When we heard that businesses needed to offer more than 30 placements to apply directly to the Government’s Kickstart scheme, we thought this would exclude a large number of SMEs in our region.
“We set up MY Kickstart as an easy to use service that allows businesses in the Mid-Yorkshire region to apply for funding and support through the scheme, even if they cannot offer 30 or more job placements. You don’t need to be a member of the Chamber to get involved and we are looking forward to working with many businesses and helping our region’s young people to access good work opportunities.”
An end-to-end support service
Once a business has pledged to offer at least one placement, the MY Kickstart team check each business’s credentials, apply for funding on behalf of the group, liaise with the job centre to find suitable candidates and provide the mandatory employability support the young person needs to be more able to move into sustainable employment following the placement. My Kickstart is working with Supplytrain CIC to deliver the employability support. This means the employer does not need to worry about this mandatory element of the programme. The employability support is tailored to each young person and aims to give them the skills and careers advice needed to move into long-term employment once their placement ends.
The business’s commitment is to interview young people, offer a contract for the duration of the placement, pay the young person (to be reimbursed by the government) and support them to develop and succeed in their roles.
