Transforming the Future of Employability

Leadership, Collaboration, and Compassion in the “Get Britain Working” Vision

The UK Government’s 2024 Get Britain Working White Paper has laid out an ambitious and transformative vision aimed at tackling economic inactivity, supporting individuals facing multiple barriers to employment, and ultimately boosting sustainable employment opportunities across the nation. This White Paper recognises that simply increasing the number of job vacancies or pressuring people into any available role is not enough. Instead, a profound shift is required, and one that moves beyond a traditional, transactional approach and instead embraces a system designed around the individual participant’s needs, health, capabilities, and life context.

Central to this vision are several significant proposals that promise to reshape how employability support is conceived and delivered. Among the most notable are the overhaul and modernisation of our Job Centres, the greater integration of employment and health services, the devolution of employability support to local authorities, and a renewed emphasis on holistic, participant-centric delivery models. Each of these elements challenges the old ways of working and demands a new ethos of care, collaboration, and long-term thinking. While the White Paper’s direction is clear, achieving its objectives will be neither simple nor swift. The scale of the cultural and operational change required is enormous and will call for strong, values-driven leadership at all levels, the forging of deeper and more trusting relationships across multiple sectors, and a steadfast focus on adding genuine value to participants’ lives.

This article aims to probe the challenges and opportunities posed by the White Paper’s agenda, the crucial role of leadership in driving and sustaining its implementation, and the importance of professional bodies such as The Institute of Employability Professionals (IEP) in guiding this transformation. Drawing on my own experience leading on the Work & Health Programme, serving as a trustee for the SAMEE charity (which supports people facing health-related barriers into self-employment and sustainable work), and my tenure as a board member for the IEP, I will illustrate how effective leadership, cross-sector partnerships, and a deeply participant-centric ethos are fundamental to realising the White Paper’s vision.

Foundations of the 2024 White Paper 

A Participant-Centric Approach

At the very heart of the Get Britain Working White Paper is a commitment to reimagining the employability system so that it places the participant’s needs, ambitions, and circumstances at its core. For too long, many employability services have focused heavily on transactional outcomes, moving participants into jobs rapidly to meet targets or secure payments. While this might have boosted short-term job placement figures, it often neglected the quality, suitability, and sustainability of those roles. Participants, especially those with complex barriers such as health conditions, caring responsibilities, or low self-confidence, did not always receive the nuanced support they required.

The Government White Paper seeks to redress this imbalance, pointing the sector towards a holistic model of employability support that prioritises skills, training, ongoing career development, and well-being. The planned integration of Jobcentres with the National Careers Service, for example, promises to offer participants a more personalised and informed pathway, helping them identify the right courses, qualifications, or experiential learning opportunities to achieve long-term career goals. Instead of focusing on immediate benefit off-flow, advisors would have the tools and the mandate to support participants in making sustainable, meaningful steps forward, steps that ultimately lead to secure, fulfilling employment.

This shift requires not only a reorganisation of services but also a profound cultural change. 

Employability providers must adopt a new ethos that recognises that participants are human beings with individual stories, struggles, and aspirations. Interactions should be grounded in empathy, active listening, and mutual respect. A participant-first mindset insists that every intervention, from initial assessment to post-placement support, adds tangible, positive value to a person’s life, enabling them to build the skills, resilience, and networks they need to succeed and thrive in work.

Overcoming the Legacy of a ‘Machiavellian’ Monetary Value Ethos

The White Paper’s call for participant-centric services comes in the wake of a longstanding approach that has sometimes prioritised monetary value above all else. In the past, some segments of the sector have felt pressure to treat participants as numbers, moving them swiftly into any job to meet stringent contractual targets. While this may have generated revenue and helped providers hit KPIs, it often did not serve participants’ best interests. 

Individuals might have found themselves pushed into unsuitable roles without adequate support, leading to churn, dissatisfaction, and ultimately failing to address the root causes of their unemployment or economic inactivity.

This Machiavellian ethos has ultimately eroded trust, both with participants and with employers who received candidates ill-prepared for the challenges of work, and also with the public perception of what ‘Employability’ is. The legacy of the ‘Welfare-To-Work’ descriptor is outdated, and largely ignorant as to the incredible work that goes into grassroots coaching people into work.

Moreover, it narrowed the sector’s horizons, reducing the concept of success to a simplistic job start rather than a pathway of development and progression. Embracing the White Paper’s vision means fundamentally letting go of this outdated mindset. Employability providers must now align with a value system that rewards meaningful outcomes, integrity, and long-term participant welfare. 

This shift requires strategic leadership teams to champion quality over quantity, ensure staff training emphasises empathy and tailored support, and invest in robust monitoring and evaluation frameworks that go beyond crude metrics, capturing the depth and richness of participants’ journeys. 

By measuring improvements in confidence, skills attainment, mental well-being, and stable job retention, providers can paint a fuller picture of their impact and truly demonstrate the value they bring to individuals and communities.

Challenges in Implementing Change 

Integrating Health, Local, and Skills Services

While the White Paper sets a compelling and progressive direction for employability, turning this vision into reality remains a complex undertaking. Key to the Paper’s proposals is the establishment of deeper, more integrated collaborations between employability providers, the National Health Service (NHS), local authorities, and learning and skills providers. Such integration is essential if we are to confront the interconnected challenges that contribute to long-term unemployment, including health inequalities, skills deficits, and localised economic disparities.

The latest Darzi report “Lord Darzi’s Independent Review of the NHS” (September 2024) reinforces the imperative of integrated health and care systems. It highlights that healthcare services must evolve beyond traditional organisational boundaries, working hand-in-glove with partners to promote wellness, prevent ill-health, and address the social determinants of health. Employability, as one of those determinants, cannot be separated from health and well-being. Thus, the Darzi report’s focus on integrated care systems, preventative models, and collaborative approaches supports and complements the White Paper’s aim of better aligning employment and health interventions.

1. Addressing Health-Related Barriers

A significant proportion of people who remain out of work cite health issues, physical, mental, or both, as significant barriers to employment. Chronic conditions, long-term illness, mental health challenges, and neurodiversity-related conditions can all limit a person’s ability to sustain or progress in work. The Darzi report underscores a fundamental shift towards prevention, early intervention, and integrated models of care. This dovetails with the White Paper’s vision of linking health services more closely with employability support, thus enabling individuals to receive well-rounded assistance that addresses not only job-related skills but also the health factors affecting their employability.

In practice, this might mean creating co-located services or joint referral pathways where employability advisors and healthcare professionals, such as mental health practitioners, GPs, occupational health specialists, or physiotherapists, collaborate to design personalised action plans. These plans would not only focus on job search or skills training but also incorporate timely and holistic health support, from counselling services to tailored workplace adaptations.

Staff in employability services must therefore become adept at recognising when health issues are acting as barriers to employment. They need the skills and cultural competency to engage participants sensitively, encourage them to seek appropriate help, and liaise with healthcare providers to ensure suitable adjustments, (like flexible working hours, specialised equipment, or workplace mental health support), are put in place. 

Over time, this integrated approach can reduce health-related inactivity, break down stigma, and empower more individuals to move from the margins of the labour market into fulfilling, sustainable work.

2. Local Authorities and Place-Based Insight

Local authorities are pivotal players in this new ecosystem. They possess granular knowledge of their communities, understanding local labour markets, transport links, childcare provision, housing availability, and other socio-economic factors that influence employment prospects. The Darzi report’s emphasis on integrated, locality-driven care and system working aligns with the idea that solutions should be tailored to place and population. By involving local authorities more deeply in employability strategies, the White Paper encourages a bespoke, community-level approach rather than imposing uniform, national templates.

For employability providers, this means building relationships with councils and engaging with local development plans, economic strategies, and social inclusion programmes. A council investing in the green economy, for example, might work with employability providers and training institutions to offer new courses in renewable energy, from installation techniques to environmental project management. By linking these local growth areas with the health and well-being agenda, ensuring that people facing health challenges also have pathways into these new industries, local authorities can support a more integrated, holistic framework. The result is not just “finding a job” but guiding participants towards a career that matches local opportunities and addresses their individual circumstances, including health-related needs.

3. Collaboration with Learning and Skills Providers

In an ever-evolving labour market shaped by digitalisation, AI, automation, and emerging sectors, continuous learning and skills development are indispensable. The Darzi report’s call for integrated models resonates here, too. Just as the NHS must partner with social care and community organisations, the employability sector must coordinate closely with further education colleges, apprenticeship providers, adult learning institutions, and other training bodies.

When health, employability, and training are linked, participants have a clearer path to improving their overall situation. An individual recovering from a mental health condition might, for instance, receive ongoing therapeutic support from the NHS, employability coaching to regain confidence and re-enter the workforce, and digital skills training to prepare for roles in a tech-driven economy. By aligning these services, participants are not merely referred from one siloed agency to another, they experience a coherent journey, with each intervention reinforcing the next. This is also where services like #ANDYSMANCLUB can add significant value in offering a no-waitlist support network for getting support. 

To achieve this coherence, integrated planning and commissioning are essential. Data sharing agreements, joint professional development sessions, and regular multi-agency forums can facilitate understanding and trust between partners. Employability providers can share intelligence about participant needs with training providers who then adapt their curricula or delivery methods. Healthcare professionals can highlight common health issues that affect employability, prompting adjustments in both skill-building programmes and job search strategies. This interconnected ecosystem ensures that participants receive the right support at the right time, minimising duplication and making the best use of available resources.

The Role of Strong, Decisive, and Compassionate Leadership

Implementing the White Paper’s vision and overcoming these challenges will depend heavily on leadership, both in the strategic sense (ensuring organisational alignment) and the cultural sense (setting values, standards, and expectations). The complexity of reform requires leaders who are not merely operational managers but transformative figures capable of galvanising teams, forging cross-sector alliances, and nurturing a new value system that places participants at the centre.

1. Setting the Tone with Compassionate Leadership

Compassionate leadership is not synonymous with leniency or passivity. Rather, it involves a courageous commitment to fairness, empathy, and genuine care for staff and participants. Leaders who model compassion create a culture in which staff feel supported to do their best work, participants feel respected and heard, and conflicts are addressed openly and constructively. Ultimately, creating a normalised approach to doing 'with', rather than doing 'to'.

This form of conscious leadership encourages listening, really understanding what participants need, what frontline staff experience, and what partner organisations contribute.

In my experience leading the Work & Health Programme, adopting a compassionate leadership style proved crucial. We faced participants managing chronic conditions, mental health challenges, or difficult personal circumstances. By setting that empathetic tone, I empowered our teams to tailor support creatively, ensuring that each participant’s journey reflected their unique context. 

Compassion ensures participants know they are valued as individuals, not treated as statistics or contractual obligations.

2. Building and Maintaining Cross-Sector Relationships

The reforms envisaged by the White Paper place a premium on integration. Leaders must therefore excel at partnership building. This involves not only identifying the right partners, (healthcare providers, local authorities, learning institutions, employers), but also investing time and effort in establishing trust, aligning objectives, and agreeing on success metrics. This might mean attending regular inter-agency forums, or multi disciplinary networks participating in joint training sessions, or co-developing new service delivery models.

Cross-sector relationships thrive when leaders are transparent, reliable, and committed to common goals. They must navigate differences in language, culture, and priorities. By focusing on shared values, improving people’s lives, enhancing local economies, and delivering social value, leaders can bridge gaps and ensure that integrated approaches become embedded practices rather than short-lived pilots.

3. Challenging Outdated Thinking and Embracing Innovation

True transformational leaders are not afraid to challenge the status quo. 

In implementing the White Paper, leaders must question entrenched performance management systems, outdated technologies, or rigid service delivery frameworks that limit flexibility. They must advocate for changes to commissioning and funding models that incentivise long-term, holistic outcomes over short-term “job start” figures.

Embracing innovation might mean piloting digital platforms for remote coaching, exploring virtual reality training solutions for participants with particular learning needs, or using data analytics to predict where specific interventions could have the greatest impact. Leaders need to foster a culture where staff feel safe to experiment, learn from failure, and celebrate successes. Only with this spirit of continuous improvement and adaptability can the sector remain agile in the face of evolving challenges.

The Institute of Employability Professionals (IEP) 

A Catalyst for Professionalisation

None of these changes can occur in a vacuum. While the White Paper sets out a strategic direction, and while leaders can shape cultures and build partnerships, the everyday work of delivering participant-centric services falls to frontline staff and managers who must navigate an increasingly complex environment. This is where the IEP steps in as a crucial force for professionalisation, standard setting, and capacity building.

As the professional body for the employability sector, the IEP has a unique vantage point. It can identify emerging trends, highlight best practice, and support continuous professional development (CPD) for those working in the field. By offering qualifications, training courses, webinars, and mentoring opportunities, the IEP ensures that employability practitioners have not only the technical skills but also the ethical frameworks and emotional intelligence required to excel.

1. Establishing Common Professional Standards

Professional standards define what good practice looks like. By setting out clear guidelines on conduct, confidentiality, participant engagement, and outcomes measurement, the IEP helps unify the sector around a shared sense of purpose and quality. These standards encourage providers to look beyond compliance and consider their ethical responsibilities to participants and communities.

2. Facilitating Knowledge Exchange and Peer Learning

The complexity of integrated employability work means that no single organisation has all the answers. The IEP can facilitate communities of practice where frontliners, managers, and leaders share experiences, troubleshoot challenges, and learn from one another. Whether it is a pioneering approach to integrating mental health support or a local authority partnership that has delivered exceptional skill-building programmes, these stories inspire other providers and raise the overall standard of service.

3. Supporting the Shift to Participant-Centric Models

To achieve the White Paper’s participant-centric vision, staff need training that helps them understand participants’ diverse backgrounds, identities, and needs. The IEP can offer courses in trauma-informed practice, mental health first aid, motivational interviewing, and other techniques that enhance advisors’ capacity to engage participants empathetically and effectively. Through CPD, employability practitioners can refine their approaches, recognising when participants need extra support, when to refer them to health or counselling services, or how best to encourage them to pursue further learning opportunities.

4. Encouraging Ethical and Values-Driven Practice

The IEP’s influence extends beyond technical skills to shape the moral compass of the employability sector. By championing ethics, fairness, and respect, it ensures that practitioners approach their roles with integrity. This guidance is especially important at a time when metrics and targets, if not carefully managed, could distort behaviour. The IEP’s emphasis on ethical practice helps providers maintain a strong focus on genuine participant outcomes, protecting against any reversion to a Machiavellian ethos.

Reflections on Personal Experience

My own experience in the sector provides tangible examples of how leadership, collaboration, and professionalisation can drive truly positive change. Leading the Work & Health Programme allowed me to the see the power of an integrated, person-centric support system. 

Working with individuals who faced health-related barriers to employment is often challenging, but the results were transformative. By engaging healthcare professionals and services such as The Better Health Generation - United Kingdom, employing specialist advisors trained in mental health support, and collaborating with local partners, we could address participants’ underlying issues rather than superficially pushing them into jobs.

As a trustee for the SAMEE Charity, I have observed how compassionate leadership and cross-sector relationships can support those with complex needs. SAMEE focuses on self-employment and entrepreneurship as viable pathways for individuals facing challenges in traditional employment environments. Through personalised mentoring, tailored business coaching, and ongoing pastoral support, participants develop confidence, resilience, and the capacity to forge their own futures. The success stories emerging from SAMEE reinforce the idea that when services are designed around participants’ strengths and interests, rather than merely trying to fit them into existing systems, genuine transformation becomes possible.

Serving 2 years on the board of the IEP has further strengthened my belief in the importance of professionalising the sector. The IEP’s work in developing industry qualifications, professional registration, and CPD opportunities has directly contributed to raising standards, sharing learning, and embedding ethical, participant-centred practice, now on an international basis! Providers who engage with the IEP’s resources and guidance in my experience tend to deliver more positive outcomes, foster healthier workplace cultures, and achieve greater respect from participants and partners alike.

Transformational Leadership 

The Essential Key to Success

Every aspect of the White Paper’s implementation comes back to leadership. 

Within individual organisations, across partnerships, and at a strategic level. Transformational leadership involves inspiring and motivating teams to go beyond their comfort zones, constantly challenging assumptions, and seeking new approaches that better serve participants.

Leaders must recognise that change is often unsettling. Staff who have long worked under transactional and autocratic leadership models may feel uncertain about shifting performance metrics, new partnership arrangements, or the emphasis on professional development. This is largely formed around a lack of psychological safety within teams, and that come back to the leadership. 

Strong and compassionate leaders can guide these transitions by communicating the vision clearly, listening to staff concerns, and providing the training and support necessary to adapt.

Transformational leaders must also be relentless advocates for participant-centric approaches. This may mean challenging commissioners to alter funding frameworks that incentivise short-term outcomes, or holding employers to account when they fail to provide inclusive working environments. By consistently placing participant welfare at the top of the agenda, leaders ensure that all stakeholders remain focused on the ultimate goal: improving lives, not just increasing job placement rates.

Rethinking Commissioning and Policy Environments

While leadership and professionalisation within the sector are crucial, systemic support from policymakers and commissioners is equally important. The 2024 White Paper nudges commissioners towards outcomes-based models that reward meaningful participant progression, sustained employment, and skill development over simple off-flow metrics. Policymakers should embrace these changes wholeheartedly, ensuring that contractual arrangements, funding cycles, and monitoring frameworks align with the participant-centric ethos.

Commissioners can consider multi-year contracts that give providers the stability to invest in staff development, forge lasting partnerships, and experiment with innovative interventions. Such stability contrasts with short-term contracts that encourage providers to chase quick results rather than invest in sustainable solutions.

Moreover, policymakers could support the sector by sponsoring research and evaluation that identifies what truly works in integrated, participant-focused employability models. Robust evidence can then inform continuous improvement efforts, guiding the sector towards even more effective collaboration with health, local, and skills services.

A New Era of Employability: Building a Brighter Future Together

The 2024 Get Britain Working White Paper presents the UK with a profound opportunity to reshape how we tackle unemployment, underemployment, and economic inactivity. Instead of relying on outdated models that prize monetary value over human worth, it invites us to build a system that views employability as part of a holistic effort to support individuals’ health, well-being, skill development, and social inclusion.

Realising this vision demands that we embrace complexity, navigate interdependencies, and remain steadfast in our commitment to participants’ long-term success. It requires leaders who can translate strategic policy aims into day-to-day practice, instilling cultures of empathy, respect, and collaboration within their teams. It requires professional bodies like the IEP to uplift standards, provide guidance, and foster communities of learning and improvement. It requires all stakeholders, healthcare professionals, local authorities, training providers, charities, employers, and frontline advisors to see themselves as partners working towards a common goal. 

While the transformation will be challenging, the potential rewards are immense. By creating a participant-centric, integrated, and ethically grounded employability system, we can help more people achieve fulfilling, sustainable work. Such work does not simply alleviate unemployment statistics, it enriches families, strengthens communities, boosts local economies, and enhances the social fabric of our communities that the government are seemingly so desperate to achieve.

As someone deeply immersed in this field, I am confident that this transformation is within our grasp. The key lies in our willingness to embrace the White Paper’s vision wholeheartedly, invest in professional and organisational growth, and never lose sight of the real people whose futures depend on our collective efforts.

Towards a Compassionate, Integrated, and Sustainable Employability System

The journey to realise the 2024 Get Britain Working White Paper’s vision is both ambitious and urgent. At a time when economic uncertainty and structural inequalities continue to shape people’s lives, the need for a more humane and holistic employability system could not be clearer. By integrating health and employability services, empowering local authorities, collaborating closely with learning and skills providers, and placing participants front and centre, we can develop a system that not only moves people into work but sets them on a path of personal growth, resilience, and satisfaction.

Such a system requires unwavering leadership, leaders who model compassion, who challenge outdated thinking, and who champion professionalisation and continuous improvement. It demands that employability providers abandon a narrow focus on monetary metrics, embracing instead an ethos that recognises the intrinsic value and potential in every participant. It calls upon the IEP to further professionalise the sector, ensuring that everyone working in employability has the capacity, competence, and character to deliver exceptional support.

Above all, the White Paper’s vision speaks to our shared responsibility to help one another thrive. By working together, across organisations, sectors, and regions, we can create a brighter, fairer future in which nobody is left behind, and everyone has the opportunity to achieve meaningful, sustainable work. In doing so, we will not only “Get Britain Working” but build a society where work is a stepping stone to better health, greater social inclusion, and a more hopeful tomorrow.

In essence, it means we leave nobody behind.