Set up to provide a vital link between unemployment and permanent work, the Employability Team manages the Government’s New Deal Programme locally. Over the years it has helped around 3,000 job seekers, with more than 1300 of these (43%) of those finding employment.

One of its major success stories is Dorothy Allen, one of the first people it worked with and now taking up an administrative  post with the Team itself. Ten years on, one marriage, two children and four steps up the career ladder later, Dorothy is poised to join the council’s Planning Services central technical team, faced with the huge task of managing the systems for planning online.

Dorothy had left her native South Africa with qualifications in IT, but wanted to take time out to “go travelling”, as she puts it. In 1996, she had landed on the Isle of Gigha with a job in the island’s hotel. ‘I really enjoyed my time on Gigha’, she says, ‘but after two years, I knew that I wanted to do something different with my working life and career. I had been out of an office working environment pretty much since I left school and the council’s Employability Team offered me the perfect opportunity to adapt back into that world and receive training in key skills whilst doing a real job and getting paid to boot’.

Dorothy has nothing but praise for the Employability Team’s approach to getting people into work. ‘It gave me the confidence to come back in to an office working environment, and it is so often confidence that is lacking. I believe that the Argyll and Bute employability project is one of the best in the country and it certainly helped me get where I am today’.

The Employability Team provides a range of strategies to help people into work – including placements in wide variety of businesses to semi-sheltered workshop experiences; and learning and skills opportunities from basic literacy skills, to construction and manufacturing skills. Overall, the Team has developed one of the most successful delivery models in the UK.

Known as Project Craftwork, its network of workshops has bases in Oban, Campbeltown, Helensburgh and Dunoon, with one in Clydebank serving people in West Dunbartonshire. The workshops offer the chance to experience a range of domestic trades such as plumbing, joinery, roofing, kitchen and bathroom fitting, plastering, tiling and ceramic floor laying.

Projects which the Team undertakes for bodies such as housing associations and social services offer opportunities in landscaping and other environmental work, bringing the added value of improving life and facilities for local communities.

Councillor Robert Macintyre, Argyll and Bute Council’s Spokesperson for the Economy says: ‘Working within our remote, rural and coastal areas has its own challenges and rewards. In this context, two of the key factors in the undoubted success of the Employability Team are its innovative approach in establishing Project Craftwork and its record for excellent partnership working.

‘The Council is proud of the achievements of this Team which continues to work closely with local people, both businesses and individuals, to resist the impact of the current economic downturn and to prepare a solid foundation for building recovery and economic growth’.

The council is now looking to develop and expand the work of the Employability Team by bidding for a contract which would enable it to roll out ‘Project Craftwork’ across the whole of the north of Scotland.

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