Financial Services Access to Call Centre: evaluation report

The Financial Services Access to Call Centre project was a pilot, stand-alone project which aimed to raise awareness of job opportunities in and increase the pool of skilled labour for financial services call centres in the Edinburgh and Coatbridge areas. It did this through customised job training on short courses run at local colleges, and through interviews set up by financial services companies.

Data was gathered from face-to-face interviews with the colleges, phone interviews with students and face-to-face or phone interviews with the companies.

The course succeeded in the following ways: changing participants’ perceptions of call centre work; equipping participants with the basic skills needed for such work; and raising awareness of financial services call centre jobs. The course was less successful in the volume of participants put through training and the number of job outcomes.

It was recommended that: the participating financial services companies should be more involved and committed with the courses in several ways, to improve job outcomes; the contract between SEEL and the colleges should be more clearly defined; and better and more realistic targets should be set and an evaluation carried out during the course to identify and deal with any problems. It was recommended that the course should be discontinued until the issues raised by the evaluation had been satisfactorily dealt with.