Banti Singh

Effectuality seeks to help socially excluded, economically weaker sections of communities by empowering individuals and organisations with the skills & expertise they need to be more effective in eradicating benefit dependency and child poverty.

My role as Partnership Manager involved developing strategic partnerships on a pan London basis, identifying synergies that can be combined with our own. I seek out organizations and individuals who work on the welfare to work and skills agenda in an effort to network, share best practice and secure further business.

I have been instrumental in creating a partnership network in geographical areas where we have historically had no experience, represented Reed in Partnership at several national level fora and developed a model for local partnership coordinators to follow.

See above.

Working on secondment with the Business Development Team, I was brought in for my local knowledge, experience with the client groups we work with and operational expertise to help research and write tenders for future business.

Having helped secure significant business for the company, I reverted to my newly acquired position, that of Partnership Manager for London.

See above for description of the company's business.

Very much like my current job, but with a more local focus on East London. I developed a network of partnerships and strategic alliances unrivalled in any part of the company and it was due to my contribution in this position that the next jobs came about.

See above.

My role involved in developing specialized intervention to assist those from Ethnic Minority Groups facing social isolation and exclusion from the employment market due to their ethnicity, lack of basic skills, severe to moderate ESOL needs and lack of UK work experience.

A lot of my work centered around 'reverse' discrimination and the perception of it, an idea never before considered by any kind of IAG provision. I continue to work on reverse discrimination.

In this role I was tasked to develop employer links and generate vacancies at a local level for our service users.

This involved closley examining individual caseloads to guage the types of jobs sought and then target employers accordingly. I also developed and ran sector-based 'job fairs'.

As a Community Consultant for Reed In Partnership's Action Team in Newham, I helped engage people from hard to reach sections of the community and worked with them to identify and reduce the effect of the barriers they faced getting a job.

Apart from working with the members, this involved a fair bit liaising with organizations for specialist help - such as debt advice, childcare, racial discrimination, ageism, etc. - and with employers. This is where I came to my own.

I was carefully mentored and coached, at the same time given plenty of leeway to grow and contribute my own ideas. Learning rapidly, I saw my set of responsibilities change and grow over the next few years.

My second job in the UK, was very similar to the one preceding it, with one difference: I dealt with 18-24 year olds on New Deal.

Seetec is a fantastic company to work for, and the 20-minute commute to work was just perfect, however it seemed like a repeat of what I'd already done for nearly two years. I needed bigger challenges.

My first ever job in the UK, I was tasked with the identification of employers that could take on Basic Skills, ESOL, IT and Care trainees on work experience for a fixed period of time. This formed an integral part of the courses they did with us. I initially started with TNG as a trainee, having newly arrived in the UK with poor IT skills and no UK work experience.


At the time I joined TNG/Avanta, we had only 8 employers, offering 12-20 work-experience places, none of which ever turned into jobs, as most of them were with charities like Age Concern, Oxfam and Scope. By the time I left, I had redifined the placement officer role, was responsible for two members of staff (Assistant Placement Officers) and had engaged over 50 employers offering 175 places for our learners. None of these placements were in charities and most offered the opportunity for the learners to progress into paid jobs.

Some key employers included: Marks & Spencer (3 branches), Tesco (3 branches), Jewish Care (2 homes), Leonard Cheshire (1 home), Peacock Stores (7 branches), 3 Londis Franchises and many,many more.