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Outplacement
What is outplacement?
- There are a variety of firms, both large and small, that provide outplacement services to organisations who are making making people redundant.
- What they provide, how they provide it and how long they provide it for, is usually subject to the contract your former employer has struck up with them. The more generous the contract, the more generous the service.
- Sometimes you can choose your own provider but usually, you are directed to the company's choice of partner. Essentially, the client company is paying for professional help to get redundant employees back on their feet again as quickly as possible.
- Not all organisations provide this free help. Not all can afford it, as it doesn't come cheaply. It isn't necessarily the case that your erstwhile employer doesn't care about your future wellbeing, they just may not be able to run to paying the bill for it.
- Some may have other, more colourful, explanations as to why their former bosses aren't helping them in this way, but calling in an outplacement provider when you've called in the receivers, isn't always a top option (well, unless you were part of the Rover Group!).
- According to Right Coutts, one of the big players in this market, one of the key reasons for employers providing outplacement is that it has a clear positive impact on the organisation's reputation among remaining employees, the wider community in which it operates and the job market in general. This is of course of significant interest to the investor community and the media as well.
Outplacement companies will usually provide a mixture of the following
- Career counselling, profiling, individualised assessment of potential and strengths
- CV help
- Counselling on issues such as finances or emotional responses to redundancy
- Help to find a job, access to job searching tools: the internet, recruitment directories, newspapers etc
- Access to CV production tools - computers with word processing software, printers etc
- Seminars on options such as starting your own business
- Help with networking
Anyway, for those of you who didn't get a nice outplacement deal, the New Life Network is here to help. If redundancy is on the cards, find out if outplacement will be part of your severance package and make good use of it. 'Every little helps' as Tesco would say.
If you have an interesting story to tell us about outplacement - please contact us.
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