Council to offer agency social workers full access to training

Wolverhampton council are teaming up with recruitment agency Liquid Personnel to provide a training programme for their agency workers.

Agency workers often find it difficult to access training and keep up with their continuing professional development, usually having to take time off work and pay for costly courses out of their own pocket.

David Cahill, Liquid Personnel’s Midlands manager said: “Agency workers were left on their own in terms of their professional development, and they were hitting a glass ceiling.”

Wolverhampton aims to give their agency workers access to all the training available to permanent staff, so that their workforce is “as highly trained as possible,” Cahill said.

The council hopes this will make them more attractive as an employer, having experienced difficulty in the past with competition from nearby Birmingham.

Susan Serventi,workforce development manager at Wolverhampton, said the council are trying to be “really pro-active” about training agency staff.

“If we are going to have them working with our vulnerable people, we want them to be meeting all the standards we would expect of our permanent staff,” she said.

She added the council hopes they will be able to bring some of these agency workers into their permanent workforce.

Liquid Personnel will supply the authority with all of its agency social work staff through the council’s in-house agency Yoo Recruit, and in turn all Wolverhampton social workers both agency and permanent will have access to the recruitment agency’s online portal of training courses and professional development tools.

Agency staff will also be given access to all of the in-house training made available to permanent staff by the council.

The programme is to launch on 17 November.