 Graduates and business professionals hit hard by the recession will find help in the shape of a new £1m training and skills centre set to open at Kingston’s Penrhyn Road campus this month.
Over the next 18 months the centre, which was the brainchild of the university, aims to help more than 3,000 unemployed professionals and graduates find work or set up their own businesses. One-to-one careers advice, an internship scheme to pay companies offering work experience to graduates, CV workshops and interview techniques are on offer to help redundant executives and managers find work, vacancies which Job Centres do not have the capacity to offer. Deborah Lock, the university’s executive director of enterprise, said: “We spoke to all the businesses and faculties that we had dealings with and asked what we could do to help. They said that they could survive the recession but would not be ready for the upturn, that the training they needed requires fees that were just too high. Students are coming out of university without the necessary skills and this centre will now provide that.” She continued, “It’s a Government ‘hit and run’ strategy to help people very quickly but it will make an enormous difference to small companies and in Kingston’s case it might lead to great things.” The university worked alongside Kingston Chamber of Commerce, Kingston College, the Kingston Council, South London Lifelong Learning Network and Job Centre Plus to bid for a £430,397 grant from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). More than 70 universities across the country will also offer professionals help during the downturn after receiving a share of around £27m in Government funding. A further £343,712 will come from Kingston University, £95,000 from the council, £14, 256 from the College and £20,000 from the Chamber of Commerce. Lisa Gagliana, chief executive of Kingston Chamber of Commerce, said that working with the university was an “exciting” opportunity and would orchestrate a way for the two groups to benefit each other: “It will combine what we, the Chamber, are planning to do anyway, with what KU wants for its students, and we believe that the transfer of knowledge and the potential value that our target market can offer to students to create opportunities is potentially immense.” She added, “What we do well is to create networks and run events for local businesses, so we thought, why not do that for unemployed professionals as well.” Graduate vacancies in London are expected to drop by 5.4% in 2009, and the capital is also forecast to lose 7.9% of 370,000 of its jobs in the next two years. Michael Hill, acting director of academic development at the university, said: “We are delighted that the university had been successful in its bid to establish a graduate-to-business centre which will help put businesses in contact with graduates from Kingston University and other universities and help those who have just graduated to find employment in these difficult economic times.”
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