Leading infrastructure services provider Amey, in partnership with Birmingham City Council and Jobcentre Plus, has won a national HR award for delivering a targeted recruitment and training campaign to help local unemployed people get back into work.
Amey is delivering the Birmingham Highways Maintenance and Management Service, a £2.7 billion contract with Birmingham City Council to refurbish and improve the city’s roads, footways, bridges, tunnels, street lighting and traffic control systems. The 25-year programme presented a unique opportunity to get long-term unemployed people back into sustainable employment.
Judges recognised that all of the organisations involved had signed an employment charter, committing to train and recruit local people on the highways service. Together they have provided 72 people with jobs, taken on more than 20 graduates and apprentices and assessed 100 people for potential jobs.
Now the partnership has been named best at innovation in recruitment at a ceremony organised by Personnel Today – a leading UK Human Resources website.
Valerie Hughes-D’Aeth, Group HR Director at Amey said: “The Personnel Today win is both great news and a brilliant achievement for the partnership. Amey’s priority is to spread the benefits of our contracts into local communities and we have made good progress to achieve this in Birmingham by creating jobs, tackling social exclusion and contributing to economic regeneration. We are extremely proud to win our sixth HR award within one year.”
This award marks Amey’s sixth HR win during 2011, Amey also won the overall award and the Building HR Capability category at the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) awards; ‘Team of the Year’ at the prestigious Employee Benefits Awards; Most Successful Change Management Programme at the National HR Excellence Awards 2011 and won a silver in the Small to Midsize Enterprise Implementation category at the SAP Quality Awards.
With nearly 12,000 employees, Amey delivers a wide range of HR projects; last year the HR team TUPE transferred over 2,000 employees into the company from more than 25 different organisations. On the £2.7bn Birmingham Highways Maintenance and Management Service contract alone, 250 employees TUPE transferred from Birmingham City Council to Amey and 300 jobs were directly created.