Staying on the right side of the law

Generally a good principle to follow in all aspects of life, especially in your working life. Doing the right thing, in the right way to protect yourself, your organisation and most importantly your customers should never be taken lightly.

But where do you start when you are working ‘lean startup’ style, without a legal and compliance team to rely on and no prior knowledge and experience in the field you are working in?

The first product from Mission Beyond uses conversations with young adults about their interests, passions, life experiences and hobbies in order to uncover skills they might not realise they already have to be hired.

It then translates the input into skills relevant to the job market and offers advice as to how they can be articulated to support them in applying for and securing a job. So arguably our proposition offers career advice and if we are offering career advice do we need to adhere to any legislation or regulation?

Searching for an answer starts in the same place as any search for information: Google! Two searches — Is career advice regulated? And is there any legislation covering career advice?

Results to the first search were Graduate schemes in compliance and regulation or Careers in regulation. The second search had more success:

• Strategy & legislation at Careers England

In 2018 the Department of Education provided statutory guidance for governing bodies, school leaders and school staff on career guidance and access for education and trading providers. Therefore there is statutory guidance on delivering career advice within the educational system. But as we’re not within the educational system, that’s not applicable to our product.

If it’s this hard to find any information, it might be because career advice offered outside of the educational system is not regulated. Maybe so, but worth further checking to make sure. Researching other websites that offered a similar service to our product, to see what if any legal statements they stated on their websites again proved fruitless. However, it’s a risky approach to rely on what a competitor is doing or not doing, so you always need to do your own due diligence.

One of the websites checked was the National Careers Service on .gov.uk which could be considered a credible source and they did not have any legal information either. They did have a “contact us” feature, for any questions. Asking them if careers advice was regulated resulted in a response within 24 hours as to where more information could be found.

Having researched the links and information provided, one of which was to Careers England, the conclusion is, that there is no specific legislation our product needs to comply with, but if we choose to, we could become members of Careers England who are the sole trade association for organisations involved in the provision of careers education, information, advice and guidance (CEIAG) products and services in England for people of all ages.

In addition we could apply for the Career Assured Quality Award for digital resources offered by the Career Development Institute as a mark of credibility for career advice services available online.

One to add to the backlog for consideration.