The new RORA Jobs & Training toolkit gives registered users access to courses and job ads
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From a simple response to an emerging crisis, The Big Issue’s Ride Out Recession Alliance has continued to stand against poverty in the Covid-19 pandemic. That will not change in our 30th year.
Earlier this week, we launched RORA Jobs and Training, a one-stop-shop to help people who have been made unemployed during the Covid crisis get back on their feet.
Lockdowns have taken income away from hundreds of Big Issue sellers. Support The Big Issue and our vendors by signing up for a subscription.
A total of 2.6 million people are expected to be out of work by the middle of this year, according to Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s Spending Review forecast.
We want to directly help people who have recently lost their job, or who feel they are in danger of doing so. Our RORA toolkit includes a free three-month digital subscription to The Big Issue, a weekly newsletter with tips on job hunting and access to free or discounted training.
To bring this to those who need it, we have teamed up with leading jobs board Adzuna and online training organisation FutureLearn. Here’s what you need to know about the two organisations helping us to help others.
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Adzuna
Last year was an unprecedented year for the jobs market with UK hiring activity collapsing after Covid-19 and still below normal levels, creating a huge challenge for anybody looking for work.
That’s why in September last year, Adzuna launched a campaign to Get Britain Hiring again to help 100,000 people get back into work who wouldn’t have done so otherwise. Whether that’s helping people find work faster, providing quality advice to the newly unemployed or harnessing the power of technology to match jobseekers to jobs, the whole team at Adzuna says it is motivated to do its bit.
We're delighted to have teamed up with @BigIssue and @futurelearn to help unemployed Brits find the right training and jobs.
Adzuna is a job search engine bringing over half a million job vacancies together into one place to make finding the right job easier. They do this in three ways: aggregating all the jobs on offer into one place (we index over 95 per cent of job ads in Britain); helping jobseekers build their confidence, develop strong CVs and feel ‘battle ready’ with tools like ValueMyCV and CareerPaths; and providing data insights giving the inside scoop on who’s hiring, how much they pay, and where the jobs are.
Adzuna is a huge advocate of The Big Issue’s campaign to help the unemployed and those at risk of becoming unemployed to upskill, gain confidence and find their next job. Worryingly, the recession has affected lower-paid workers most severely and supporting these groups is vital.
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They hope to share their tools and tips for Big Issue subscribers and work collaboratively to provide more routes into employment for the millions of people affected by the pandemic.
FutureLearn
FutureLearn’s purpose is to transform access to education. They do that by partnering with over a quarter of the world’s top universities to support millions of learners across the globe to develop skills and achieve their personal and professional goals.
They are a leading social learning platform founded in December 2012 by The Open University and are now jointly owned by The Open University in the UK and The SEEK Group.
FutureLearn use design, technology and partnerships to create enjoyable, credible and flexible short online courses and microcredentials, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate degrees.
In addition to top universities, they also partner with leading organisations such as Accenture, British Council, CIPD, Raspberry Pi and Health Education England (HEE), as well as being involved in government-backed initiatives to address skills gaps such as The Institute of Coding and the National Centre for Computing Education.
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Susannah Belcher, chief operations officer said: “The Ride Out Recession Alliance is a fantastic campaign that we at FutureLearn are proud to support. We’re on a mission to transform access to education in order to build a better future and, in partnership with The Big Issue, we’re aiming to connect valuable, in-demand courses with people who need the most support navigating the challenges of the current UK job market.
“With hundreds of free, self-serve digital courses across high-growth sectors such as healthcare, coding and digital marketing, and softer skills such as communication, remote working and interview skills; learners can choose when, where and how they progress through the content, with the flexibility to learn at their own pace and the benefit of our unique social learning tools.”
The Ride Out Recession Alliance will continue to do all we can to ensure that figure does not become a reality and to offer the people hit hardest through no fault of their own a hand up to get back into work with the training and reskilling to back it up.
We know just how destructive homelessness and poverty can be at The Big Issue and we set up RORA to ensure no one will be left behind by the pandemic. The Big Issue and its RORA partners will not fail.
The Big Issue is committed to helping keep the UK in their jobs and in their homes through the pandemic and beyond. Register for our jobs and training programme to get free training, regular careers advice and access to hundreds of thousands of job listings. Sign up here.
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Career tips and advice from our Jobs and Training series:
This Christmas, 3.8 million people across the UK will be facing extreme poverty. Thousands of those struggling will turn to selling the Big Issue as a vital source of income - they need your support to earn and lift themselves out of poverty.
