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Working with young people: roles and responsibilities
Working with young people: roles and responsibilities

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2.2 Roles within agencies, projects and organisations

The next activity is intended to widen your understanding of the variety of roles undertaken in the field of‘work with young people’.

Activity 5 Variety of job roles with young people

Timing: 1 hour 0 minutes

Below you will find 10 advertisements for jobs. We offer them as a snapshot in 2005 of this increasingly wide-ranging field of work with young people.

As you read the advertisements, try to identify and describe each of the following:

  • the name of the organisation or service

  • their particular focus

  • the target group

  • the organisation's purpose and underlying values

  • the role being offered or described.

Some information – like underlying values – will be implicit rather than explicit, so you will have to work out what you think the organisational values might be.

Discussion

Comment

These advertisements show not only the diversity but also the complexity of work with young people. In them we find ‘young carers’, ‘young disabled people’, ‘asylum seekers and refugees’, ‘young offenders’ and others. Roles range from development workers, to advisers, counsellors, mentors and supervisors.

Alongside the roles with young people, there are what we might call ‘organisational’ roles such as fundraising and administration. These jobs all involve a particular area of expertise, related to the target group. For example, in advertisement A, familiarity with online support would be an advantage. In advertisement C, where the target group is ‘asylum seekers and refugees’, the applicant will need knowledge of housing; in E and G, applicants will need experience of supervision and management.

Some organisations are explicit about their underlying values in their advertisements. For example, in B the name of the organisation does not appear, but the fact that the advert mentions ‘active Christian involvement’ suggests it is a project supported and funded by a Christian organisation. The focus is arts and performance; the target group is ‘youths from a deprived area’. Christian values are likely to be underlying the service. The young people may be seen as vulnerable and in need of protection. Key roles seem to be ‘facilitator’ and ‘community developer’.