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Gaby Atfield was invited to give a keynote speech at Talent Match Staffordshire's conference and awards ceremony in Lichfield on 22nd November 2018. Talent Match is a five-year, £108m Big Lottery-funded programme supporting young people who are furthest from the labour market, including hidden NEETs who are completely outside the benefits, work and training system, gain the skills they need to get into employment.

IER, in partnership with CRESR at Sheffield Hallam University, City-REDI at Birmingham University and Cambridge Economic Associates, have been evaluating the programme across the 21 youth unemployment hotspots in England since 2014.

The presentation on findings from the national evaluation can be found .

Dr Heike Behle delivered a keynote on ‘Employability as an outcome of tourism education beyond TEF: Theoretical conceptualisation and measurement’ at the Association For Tourism in Higher Education (ATHE) conference on ' on 6th December 20018 at Leeds Beckett University.

Following the 2017 Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices’ recommendation that the UK Government should develop new measures of job quality for the UK, a Working Group was established by the RSA and Carnegie UK Trust, and included IER Director Chris Warhurst. The Group has now reported, launching its . The report recommends that seven dimensions of job quality should be monitored annually by the government. These dimensions include pay and benefits, voice and representation, work-life balance and job security. A formal response form the UK Government is expected later this autumn.

A new report, ‘Self-employment and the Armed Forces Community’, has revealed the barriers ex-Service personnel face in becoming self-employed after leaving the Armed Forces and calls for broader support from the MOD to help Service personnel transitioning out of the Forces and into self-employment. Research conducted by the IER, supported by defence technology company QinetiQ and X-Forces Enterprise (XFE) and funded by Forces in Mind Trust, was carried out to understand what more could be done to support ex-Service personnel to successfully move into self-employment. The report was launched on 10th October at the X-Forces Enterprise 5th Anniversary event at the London Stock Exchange.

More info can be found here and a copy of the report, co-authored by IER's Professor Clare Lyonette, Dr Sally-Anne Barnes and Dr David Owen , Natalie Fisher and Karen Newell (both QinetiQ), Ren Kapur MBE and Martin Wing (both X-Forces Enterprise) can be viewed here.

Jenny Bimrose was invited to give the keynote presentation at the , in Wellington, New Zealand on 23rd October, 2018. The conference, entitled: 'Social Justice', was held in partnership with Victoria University of Wellington and the Tertiary Education Commission.

Jenny’s presentation focused on: ‘Socially just practice: Making sense and moving forward.’ Social justice values have underpinned the profession of career development since it was established at the turn of the last century out of concern for economic and political reforms that would help disadvantaged people, including young people and immigrants, find jobs in industrialised societies. In contemporary society, the shape of many career development services has transformed recently because of the neo-liberal agendas that are framing the provision of education, social, and labour market policies.

This presentation examined some of the key challenges for career development arising from changed and changing social contexts.

• What do we mean when we talk about social justice from a career development perspective?
• What, realistically, can be achieved?
• What might be some of the implications for career and employment practice?
• And how do these shifts and changes impact on the professional identity of career development practitioners?