Now the Peterborough City Council and East of England Development Agency (EEDA) have gone a step further and founded a Women’s Business Centre in Bridge Street.

The centre is the second of its kind in the UK. As well as offering advice about financing and setting up a business, the centre will include a wi-fi enabled computer and hot desking area, a training room and mailbox facilities which women can use for business correspondence. A crèche is on site for use by mothers who are taking part in the centre’s wide range of training courses and there will be a café and a wardrobe exchange.  To find out more, click here.

There is additional training support available to women who are facing redundancy in the East of England and are keen to develop new skills.  The R2R scheme offers a training fund of £700 as well as professional careers advice – contact Katherine Wiid an accredited R2R adviser on 01780 484910 or visit www.recrion.co.uk/free to see if you are eligible.

I was thrilled to get an email from Elizabeth Smith, an L & D professional who has recently achieved her fellowship status of the CIPD.  She has some practical ideas of her own …

I read your article and my honest feedback on it is that it’s really good – very clear, pertinent and helpful, and I hope it gets disseminated more widely than the Training Journal readership!  I think your case study example is great.

I completely agree with your premise that there is a key HR/L&D role in ensuring that the management team is sufficiently trained and supported in handling the redundancies.  This is something that is too often overlooked.

The challenge is providing this training in both a timely and non-rushed fashion.  It’s probably not something that companies want to provide too pointedly until they actually have the need, and then often they don’t want too many people to know about things (often including managers) before the time of announcement!  I guess where there is a consultation period, then this can be used to train managers more openly, although it mustn’t be seen to be pre-empting the outcomes of the consultation.  Also, for the future, perhaps some coverage of this needs to go into general management training programmes – so handling redundancies is one of the potential situations managers are prepared for in advance, alongside disciplinaries, ill-health management, etc..

Your article also challenged my thinking around the situations in which strengths-based as opposed to competency-based thinking can be best applied.  Of course you are absolutely right that using a skills matrix and competency-based interviewing for selection purposes is necessary to be fair and legal in redundancy situations.

For more information on how best to prepare your management team to tackle the difficult issue of redundancies, read Katherine's article in The Training Journal, June 2009.

For a full free copy, you can email or call Katherine on 01780 484910 or visit www.recrion.co.uk/redundancy-case-study