Spring 2010

Employment in Calderdale

The Council is taking action to help local people and businesses address some of the problems caused by the current recession. These are programmes to help people into work, improve their skills and encourage new business start ups. To make sure we are addressing these issues in the correct way we need to know the problems you are facing and what we can do to help.

The first question asked was to find out the number of respondents in work / looking for employment. The table shows the responses to this question:

Respondents in work / looking for employment
Work situation	% of respondents
In employment and not looking for work	49%
In employment and looking for work	7%
Unemployed and looking for work	4%
Not in employment and not looking for work	5%
On incapacity benefit and looking for work	2%
Permanently retired from work	34%

Over a third of respondents (35%) said they would like to improve their skills or qualifications to increase their potential for finding employment. We asked where they would look to help gain these skills - the following responses were given (please note the percent figures do not total 100 as more than one response was possible):

52% would look to Calderdale College
27% would look to other local colleges
46% would look to local Universities
57% would look to Adult Learning.

We then asked where panel members would look to find new job opportunities. The most popular response was to use the Internet followed by Newspapers, Specialist publications and lastly Job Centre Plus.

Just over 14% of panellists said they would be interested in receiving help to start their own businesses.

To try to understand what the main barriers are to finding a new job we then asked panel members about their experiences with this. Here are some of the responses given: