Mayor of London offers unemployed Londoners free training to secure jobs
Written on 4th, March 2022
The official press release for this initiative was launched in 2021 however, it is now having a second promotion in terms of the free training available to unemployed Londoners. The initiative aims to:
- Unemployed and low paid Londoners given opportunity to gain qualifications for free
- £11m funding package to support Londoners into good jobs and help address skills shortages in sectors key to London’s growth and recovery
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is offering unemployed and low-paid Londoners the chance to retrain for free to secure qualifications and good jobs in a range of industries including hospitality, digital, health and the green economy.
Londoners who are unemployed or in low paid work, regardless of their prior qualifications, can now access fully funded training opportunities at local colleges and adult education providers across the city to help them retrain, learn or upskill and help them into work that will support London’s recovery.
Sadiq announced a total package of £11m of funding focussed on supporting Londoners into good jobs in sectors that are key to London’s recovery and long-term economic growth.
£5m will deliver the Mayor’s Academies Programme (MAP), of which £3m will support new Academy Hubs and will bring skills providers, employers and other partners together to help tackle skills gaps. The MAP aims to support Londoners hardest hit by the pandemic into good jobs in the hospitality, digital, creative, green and health and social care industries. The programme will coordinate and improve the quality of training in London, including adult education, and will also help to address the employment gap between different groups of Londoners and improve diversity and representation in these industries.
£6m of London’s Adult Education Budget (AEB) has been made available to providers working within an Academy Hub to provide bespoke support that will help these newly skilled people into work.
Londoners have been heavily impacted by the COVID pandemic. There were around 345,000 jobs on furlough in London in the middle of August 2021 and the capital had the highest take up of the coronavirus job retention scheme of any region. Provisional estimates showed that 21 per cent of the jobs on furlough at the end of June were in the accommodation and food services sector. London’s unemployment rate was 6.4 per cent in the three months to June 2021, compared with 4.7 per cent a year earlier.
Professional Training Solutions can help individuals to access this free training as we are an approved training provider for the Mayor of London programme. Please contact us to discuss your options and we can help you access this free training. Alongside this we are also running a dedicated Early Years training programme for unemployed Londoners for more information please visit www.pleyss.co.uk
