Laid-off bankers unlikely to find employment with charities
Howard Lake | 3 December 2008 | Blogs
In British charities no haven for laid-off bankers, Reuters reports that “People dumped from finance jobs who hope to find employment in the voluntary sector may have to reconsider, because as Britain slips into recession, ailing charities are struggling to absorb the unemployed.”
I had a wry smile when I read that, thinking that the last thing the charity sector needed was some allegedly contrite ex-bankers offering to apply, in return for a salary, their debateable business skills to one of the sectors that is going to have to spend years digging itself out of the hole they dropped us in.
On the other hand, perhaps you could argue that these bankers have ably demonstrated their ability to run a non-profit business, but at least charities always intend to run on a non-profit basis.
Of course it’s not as simple as that and I accept that many people in the financial services industry had no direct hand in causing this chaos.
Still, the Reuters article shows, with charities making job cuts, it’ll be a while before many of them take on new staff, with or without financial services ‘expertise’.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.