We wrote about the FAS Work Placement Scheme that was launched back in June 2009.
Some changes to this scheme were announced recently – which will make it accessible to more people from December 1st 2009.
For unemployed participants the following criteria have been amended:
Recipients of most social welfare payments, including Job Seekers’ Allowance and Job Seekers’ Benefit, will now be eligible to apply. Unemployed graduates who are not receiving a social welfare payment will also now be eligible to apply.
2009 graduates are now also eligible to apply
The period, for which participants have to be in receipt of a social welfare payment in order to be eligible, has been reduced from 6 months to 3 months.
The requirement for a firm to have at least 10 employees has been removed.
•Previously firms could only participate if they did not have redundancies in the previous 6 months. This constraint has been reduced to 3 months. However, the level of redundancies in the last three months were less than 5% of the workforce, these firms will be eligible to participate.
The duration of the work placement has been increased to a maximum of 9 months. (was 6 months)
All changes take effect from December 1st 2009