Working4U – West Dunbartonshire Council

We are an Employability Service within West Dunbartonshire and AdvicePro as a case management system has been very effective and user friendly to enable us to adapt to meet our service needs. Setting up system to record client and case information has been easy and continual customisation is so helpful when our remit is continually changing depending on funders needs.

As well as recording client and case information, our users can record correspondence and easily upload evidence documents. Diary, Key Dates, Task and Review functionality helps our users with case management. Results and financial details can be recorded against each client.

We have the Insights Reporting custom pro version, which gives us the ability to create custom reports using any of the data recorded and enables us to report on large amounts of data and provide concise data return reports. It is very user friendly.

Many of our agencies have employability teams that use AdvicePro, who really benefit from our flexible customisation functionality.

They focus on getting young people into the work, especially those Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET). Some customers use it for adult learning and skills.

Funding from national government for these schemes has to be accounted for, to ensure it’s being used effectively and efficiently. An individual can be part of one, or many programmes. The system can log the level and the skills of the individual and record barriers to employment. This could be poor education, poverty, mental or physical ill health. Your people can indicate what types of work they would be interested in. It could be a physical manual trade, like joinery or welding, or it could be an office admin role, art and design or marketing. Whatever they feel is their field of interest is recorded on Advice Pro.

Different programmes and programme providers have varied recording and reporting criteria and, as customers can customise their own site, this can be managed internally giving more control to the agency. The young person is recorded as the client, and each case is a programme with each having their own outcomes.

One of our local authority customers has a bank of employers that are willing to give young people a start either as voluntary work, work experience or as a full-time employee. They can search for the client’s preferred area of employment and then match them with a suitable employer.

Using Auto Actions has also been a hugely useful feature for these agencies. When, an adviser places a young person into some form of employment, they record the start date of employment. Part of their reporting and monitoring requirements is that they must report on the young person’s progress at various stages. Before auto actions, the adviser had to go a specific diary that calculated all that for them, then they would have to put in four key dates for the four stages at 4, 13, 26, and 52 weeks. Using Auto Actions means that once the employment start date is recorded, they click one quick action, and it puts it calculates and puts in the four key dates for them automatically and sends a reminder to them at a specified time prior to the scheduled date.