Understanding our workforce

Homeless Link's Senior Research Manager, Debra Hertzberg, describes how the homelessness sector can get involved in helping to understand and shape the future of the homelessness workforce.

Homeless Link and our member organisations know how critical our employees and volunteers are. Day after day they deliver support to people experiencing or at risk of homelessness, who may have very complex needs and may have experienced significant trauma.

Some of our team do this on the frontline, face to face, and others do it in the back office. All are essential in the mission of ending homelessness. We also know, with funding always being tight, that recruiting and retaining these fantastic people is not always easy.

As the Government prepares its new strategy to end homelessness, they have also recognised the importance of the homelessness workforce. And as a first step in helping the sector they have commissioned Homeless Link to carry out a survey of the workforce – to understand its scale, its skills, its training needs and its challenges.

This survey of the homelessness workforce is the most comprehensive ever undertaken. It has two main parts:

1. An organisational survey, where we hope that every organisation working in homelessness (including local authorities, housing associations and the voluntary sector) will complete an analysis of the workforce from an organisational perspective.

2. A survey of individuals who are working in homelessness as a volunteer or paid employee – whether a trustee, a CEO, a service manager, as a plumber or an outreach worker – we need everyone’s views.

The two surveys should only take 15-20 minutes to complete but we need to reach as many people as possible to give the Government the most comprehensive picture of the state of our sector.

Only by gathering real data from people working in homelessness can we shape the workforce that we want to see.