We were delighted to welcome our local MP Lisa Smart to our busy Digital Job Club this week, where she had the opportunity to see first-hand why digital skills need to be part of the conversation about helping people into work.

One of the participants we welcomed that morning was new to Starting Point. She currently works as a cleaner but is looking for work that is less physically demanding.

She told us that she felt overwhelmed by the process of looking for another job. She has dyslexia and was worried that her reading and writing would hold her back. But she has years of work experience, skills and knowledge.

The barrier wasn’t whether she had something to offer an employer. It was being able to turn that experience into a CV and then navigate an increasingly digital recruitment process.

So we sat alongside her and used ChatGPT (the AI tool we find most accessible for people attending our sessions – the one they have heard of) to help turn her work experience into a digital CV. Together, we also started thinking about the kinds of roles that might suit her skills while being less physically demanding.

By the time she left, she had a CV that had been emailed to her, and her Stockport Homes employment adviser with further employment support and, importantly, a next step. She’ll come back to us to start exploring job platforms and suitable vacancies.

You can’t look for work if you can’t navigate the digital process

There is lots of support available to help people find work. But today, looking for work is itself a digital skill.

People are expected to search online job platforms, create accounts and passwords, upload CVs, understand job descriptions, complete online application forms, manage emails, attend video interviews and sometimes navigate Universal Credit journals.

Increasingly, they’ll also need to understand how tools such as AI can help them participate in that process.

For somebody who lacks digital confidence, has literacy difficulties, doesn’t have the right device or data, or simply finds online systems overwhelming, each of those steps can become another barrier between them and employment.

We’ve seen this repeatedly in our sessions. Someone may be perfectly capable of doing the job but struggle to upload the application. Another person may have decades of experience but no idea how to turn it into a CV. Someone else may be able to search for vacancies but become stuck when an employer uses a recruitment platform they’ve never seen before.

That’s why we believe digital inclusion is an accessibility issue within the employment system.

Digital should be built into employment support

At Starting Point, we don’t want to do things for people that they can learn to do themselves. We sit alongside them.

That might mean creating their first CV, learning how to use Indeed, understanding an unfamiliar application platform, uploading a document or using AI appropriately to help communicate skills and experience.

The aim isn’t simply to get one application submitted. It’s to give someone the skills and confidence to submit the next one themselves.

Our participant will be back next week. We’ll build on the CV she created this week and start exploring suitable jobs together.

And that’s why it was so valuable to welcome Lisa Smart to the Job Club. We want decision-makers to see that helping somebody into work isn’t only about identifying a vacancy.

If the route to that vacancy is digital, we need to make sure everybody has a fair chance of getting through the door.

Our employment and digital skills support in Woodley and Offerton is free to access for participants and kindly funded by CDL Software.