FE Careers Boom

Specialist Further Education job site FE Careers and their sister site FE News has started 2006 with a bang. FE Careers has had a 40% increase in visitors compared to December 05.

FE Careers and their sister website FE News had nearly 14,500 unique visitors in January, nearly 50,000 visitor sessions and 828,000 hits. This is a 17% increase in traffic compared to their previous record month from November 2005.

So how are they continuously improving their traffic, hits, advertisers and ultimately visiting job seekers? Gavin the CEO tries to answer the question ìA combination of marketing strategies. Our partnerships, website launches and continual investment back into the websites are paying dividends.î

ìOur strategic partnerships with the Association of Learning Providers (ALP), The Institute of Assessors and Verifiers (IAV) and the Association of External Verifiers (AEV) are continually generating qualified and experienced traffic to our websites.î

ìOur partnership with the Association of Learning Providers is really starting to make a difference, with a wider variety of job vacancies and news from Work Based Learning providers. Due to this partnership we can offer ALP members very cost effective job vacancy advertising. We are starting to receive feedback from our job seeking visitors that FE Careers is becoming the job board of choice for Work Based Learning jobs, which I am really pleased about. We have also been told that many senior decision makers in FE and Work Based Learning visit FE News as a part of their daily routine, which is fantastic!î

FE Careers has been busy over the past couple of months, widening their portfolio of websites. FE Careers launched four new Further Education websites in a week in January. Training Provider jobs, Assessor jobs, Tutor jobs and Vocational jobs have been developed to target a Work Based Learning job seeker audience. So are FE Careers focussing purely on Work Based Learning?

Gavin gives some insight into their strategy for their growth to date:

ìFE Careers and FE News are unique because we cover the whole Further Education spectrum. FE News features articles from FE Colleges, Training Providers, Awarding Bodies, funding providers such as the LSC, Elwa, Job Centre Plus and ESF. FE Careers offers vacancies from mainly Work Based Learning providers and specialist Further Education recruiters (Ö). But FE Careers is, by no means, solely focused on Work Based Learning- 25% of our advertisers are FE Colleges. Our next push will be to attract more FE Colleges to advertise their positions with us so as we can offer a really wide spectrum of positions to our job seekers.î


ìSir Andrew Foster completed a recent review for the DfES about Further Education and one of the most interesting observations that Foster raised was the FE is ëthe overlooked middle child in education.í At FE Careers and FE News we looked at the whole FE sector and have decided to focus some of our attention onto Work Based Learning due to the lack of professional support services offered to the sector. Our strategic partnerships with the ALP, IAV and AEV have also prompted FE Careers to further increase in our capability of Work Based Learning and to turn the spot light and attention on the Cinderella FE Sector.î

Gavin hinted at further developments to FE Careers and FE News over the coming months. These developments are in addition to their recent RSS launch and the widening of their specialist FE recruitment websites. Well, if they are keeping busy, what will they pull out of the hat over the next couple of months? I know that the elusive 1 million hits are firmly on their radar as well as the first 1,000 news articles to be published on FE News.