Kbbreview’s Save Our Skills campaign has been given the support of one of the sector’s biggest bodies. The initiative aims to keep decades of skills and experience in the industry as the inevitable redundancies caused by the coronavirus downturn start.
The Bathroom Manufacturers Association (BMA) has now endorsed the scheme – particularly significant as the majority of job seekers being helped are supplier sales reps.
“Covid-19 caused a shock like nothing our industry has experienced before,” said Tom Reynolds (pictured), BMA Chief Executive. “We are still very early on in the recovery from that shock, still reeling and assessing the possible lasting impacts. While businesses will need to make difficult decisions to survive, collectively we can’t let the legacy of 2020 be a permanent loss of knowledge and skills from the sector. Save Our Skills is a great initiative to reduce the likelihood of that happening.”
The core of the campaign is a pledge from kbbreview to send a weekly e-mail out to its entire database with the details of anyone in the kbb industry who has recently been made redundant.
Potential employers can then quickly see who is available and contact the candidates directly if they fit the bill.
“The kbbreview Save Our Skills campaign is a direct response to the very personal and sudden consequences of the lockdown,” said managing editor of kbbreview publisher Taylist Media. “Business simply disappeared overnight and, inevitably, many companies are forced into slashing costs to survive and that means making people redundant.
“This campaign is about helping those people and is not a criticism of those companies making that difficult choice so it’s fantastic to get the backing of the BMA for Save Our Skills. The job seekers we have been working with represent hundreds of years of knowledge and experience and, as an industry, we need to make a collective effort to keep the skills where they’re desperately needed and not let them drift or dissipate to other markets.”
The kbbreview Save Our Skills mailer is sponsored by Quooker and md Stephen Johnson has written about why he thinks it is such an important cause. You can read it here.
If you, or anyone you know, has recently been made redundant from any role in the kbb sector then this Q&A will tell you how to get yourself featured on the kbbreview Save Our Skills showcase mailer.
The campaign also allows independent retailers to advertise job vacancies for free on kbbreview.com. More information can be found here.
And you can view all the current jobs here.