Karen Bowring is the managing director of Professionals UK Ltd, a company which organises work experience and internship placements for international graduates and undergraduates looking to gain experience in their industry in an anglophone environment.
When the UK government rolled out the Kickstart scheme in a bid to bounce back from the Covid-19 pandemic and usher more young people into work, Professionals UK became a gateway provider for the scheme on behalf of the English language industry. Speaking on The Leaders Council Podcast, Bowring recalled this experience and highlighted the positive aspects as well as numerous difficulties.
Sitting down with host Joshua Jackson, Bowring started by sharing with listeners how she came to establish Professionals UK and offered some insight into the company’s work and how its operations had been forced to change by major events such as Brexit and the pandemic.
Bowring said: “I come from an English language background having taught in the EFL sector since graduating myself, and I’ve been in the English language teaching industry for my whole life really, from teacher to director of studies, to principal of marketing. Through that, I saw the value of international students who came to the UK to get an internship with British companies and gain work experience for a limited period of time.
“I wanted to really spread that international vibe and help improve their language skills. We’re generally dealing with university-age students in this, so a lot of sixth formers from various parts of the world who’ve historically been Europeans. Anywhere from 18 to 28, that’s the age group we work with. I've been doing that since 2005, which is when I set up the agency. It has been a long and interesting road with lots of ups and downs, because we're very much governed by politics and international events, of which there have been quite a few in the last couple of years.
“Until Brexit, we were working with 80 per cent European students and 20 per cent the rest of the world. Since then, it has flipped on its head so 80 per cent of them are rest of the world and 20 per cent are from the EU. It has been a real revolution of sorts that has happened in our whole industry, particularly so though in our niche corner of it. We're also not as big as we were in pre-Covid time. I mean, we were really kind of flying in industry education and the sector was thriving especially with the English language schools. Obviously, that domino effect of Covid meant that our bookings just disintegrated and we had to put on furlough or let go of several successful staff members.”
Elaborating on how Professionals UK pivoted in the face of the pandemic, Bowring added: “We became a kind of skeleton operation, and we became extremely agile. What we did initially was we represented our industry body English UK and became gateway providers for the government Kickstart programme. It was an amazing programme which of course has now ended, and it could have gone on longer or maybe been adapted in different ways. But on the whole, Covid was an extreme and vertical learning curve. The government was making up steps as they went along, the Department for Work & Pensions [DWP] were recruiting as fast as possible to get Kickstart off the ground and to their credit they did it well, but the teething problems proved extremely painful to anyone like us who was involved with gateway provision.”
Offering her insight into some of the challenges that Professionals UK experienced with Kickstart provision, Bowring explained: “Given how it worked, if you were a large company like Tesco you could take on 30 people and offer them a job. And these are hard to employ people, mostly in the 16-to-24 age range. Small companies needed an umbrella though and that’s what we were for the English language business. We took on about 75 people into various schools and coached them and about 45 of those got into lasting positions where they were offered jobs. It was very rewarding despite being extremely painful. We had to go through government mechanisms, and they actually lost our application paperwork the first time round so we had to resubmit all over again, which consisted of going over pages and pages of detailed data.
“I think some of the issues we found with Kickstart was that it was a geographical difficulty. So, we have quite a lot of places that we're successful in, for example the Leeds area and around Manchester, and the Brighton area. Where we found the right match of candidate for the types of placements offered, we tried to get companies to provide a lot of new skills like social media marketing and other types of things. I think small companies went for it with gusto and they tried their best. And then they had to jump through a lot of hoops to be able to be accredited and it cost them a lot of money.”
Bowring also experienced issues where there were plenty of Kickstart vacancies in some parts of the country, but the right calibre or fit of candidate simply wasn’t available at the time.
“What we also found was that we had a lot of interest from London and maybe there were too many providers, but there was just not enough candidates of the right calibre or type in the right location. So, there were some huge gaps in areas of the country, with companies offering a lot, but they just didn't have the candidates to put into the placements.”
Bowring also pointed out that owing to some minor details around their benefit arrangements, some promising candidates for Kickstart would not be eligible to participate in and benefit from the programme.
“I think there were some groups in society that were excluded for very minor reasons. An example might be something such as the candidate having one day of benefit in some way, shape or form. That excluded them from the whole six-month programme. There was often some insignificant detail that meant a lot of young people kind of missed out on this opportunity.”
Listen to the full interview with Karen Bowring below.
Have you been affected by the issues raised in this article and have something to say about your experience with Kickstart? Contact The Leaders Council here.
Photo by Ivan Shilov on Unsplash
