For people who need mental health support, getting back into work is a vital step on their recovery journey. The evidence backs this up, but although 90% of people with severe mental illness want to work, only 8% of them are in paid employment.
If you would like to join our team and champion our mission and help people who need employment support to get back into work. You will be supporting service users who are under the care of Secondary Mental Health services to gain and retain paid employment and will be based within a clinical team.
This is an incredibly rewarding role You'll have the opportunity to transform the lives of service users, to give them hope, direction and support with their recovery journey alongside other key professionals. This is also a challenging role, so you’ll need to be empathetic, adaptable and dedicated to finding clients a role that’s right for them.
As an Employment Specialist, you’ll build a good rapport with your service users, gaining a real understanding of their key skills, their aspirations and their career goals and finding them opportunities to match. You'll also spend time building productive relationships with employers in order to identify and negotiate job opportunities in the hidden labour market.
Successful applicants for this post will receive training in the IPS approach, giving you the tools, you need to provide expert support and advice to service users, staff within your clinical team (e.g. Psychiatrist, Social Workers or Mental Health Nurse), while also building positive relationships with employers, opening doors and changing perceptions around mental health. We welcome applications from people with personal experience of using mental health services.
Job Summary:
To provide support into employment for people with mental health problems including:
• managing a caseload of people who wish to return to paid work, enabling them to find or retain employment by liaising with work and training providers, accessing benefits advice and by personally providing on-going support to service users in job search and after gaining employment, in accordance with evidence based supported employment practice such as the Individual Placement and Support (IPS) model of supported employment.
• negotiate with local employers and voluntary bodies in order to secure employment opportunities within the community
• pro-actively support and motivate the client group in obtaining employment opportunities
• provide on-going support according to both the employee’s and emp