Social Mobility - why it matters to us?

There is plenty of compelling evidence indicating that the most disadvantaged in the UK are less likely to progress through the career ladder and those who are economically advantaged tend to stay at the top.  Over the last few years many organisations have started to embed social mobility strategies as a way of opening up opportunities to those from these disadvantaged pools of talent.    We at AMS are committed to levelling the playing field through our commitment to social mobility.

What are we doing?

• We formed an employee resource group (ERG) for Social Mobility in 2022, co-led by 2 x Leaders from across our business and sponsored by our Growth & Commercial Managing Director, who sits on Exco.  Our Social Mobility ERG is the second largest internal DEI community at AMS playing a critical role in driving the overall social mobility agenda and providing a safe community space enabling different ideas and perspectives to thrive
• 2 years ago we started collecting social mobility data for our UK based employees – 76% of our employees have voluntarily submitted their data
• What does the data tell us?  36% of our employees are from working class or lower socio economic backgrounds, which is slightly less than the national benchmark of 39%  We will continue to work tirelessly to increase the representation up to and beyond this national benchmark
• We were successful in reaching the Social Mobility Foundation 2022 Employer’s Index Top 75 organisations, recognising our commitment and support to social mobility in AMS.  We are currently pulling together our 2023 submission
• We continue to partner with the UK charity, Beam, who support homeless people. Since partnering, we have committed that all new employees who started with the business after 1 March 2022, are given a £10 voucher to allocate to an individual supported by Beam to help them off the streets and into a long-term career and home
• AMS Client roundtables – throughout 2023 we will be hosting 3 social mobility focused virtual events with our public sector stakeholders
• Thought leadership  - in December 2022 we published an article in our flagship publication of Catalyst titled “The UK needs to talk about why social mobility and social value matter”
• We are partnering with organisations to support in enhancing the reach to under-represented talent pools, including Recruit for Spouses and Bridge of Hope
• We support the Princes Trust NI employability programmes including “Get Hired Programmes”, “Enterprise Challenge” and “Unlock Skills for Work” in lower socio economic areas in NI

We are proud of the progress that we are making, we know we have more work to do and we remain committed to making positive change.  

I’d love to hear your thoughts on what initiatives your organisations are embarking on that are having a positive impact on social mobility.