FE Careers Celebrate their 3rd Birthday, by launching 3 new sites

www.FECareers.co.uk is no toddler. The specialist Further Education and Work Based learning job site has gone from strength in the past three years. In the past year alone FE Careers has doubled the number of hits and visitors to the site (regularly receiving over 1.2 Million hits and recently had a record month of 98,562 visitors to the site).

In these three years FE Careers has been through a number of changes. The CEO of FE Careers looks back over the past three years and gets excited about the future. Gavin ìIt sure has been an exciting ride. We have been through more updates and enhancements than I can remember, if we were a celeb we would be the equivalent of Cher. We re-branded in the first six months of the site to reflect that our clients advertise and recruit across all of Further Education and Work Based Learning. We were one of the first people to integrate RSS back in 2005. Our sister site FE News has gone from strength to strength too, with regular exclusive interviews from Ministers, the LSC, awarding bodies, TUC and the education AssociationsÖ many of whom we work in partnership with. Itís been a lot of fun.

ìI think the main reason for our success has been our amazing selection of advertisers and partnerships. We have had a real range of advertisers across the entire FE sector, with everyone from the Learning and Skills Council (the LSC ñ the Government funding), awarding bodies such as CACHE and ENTO, sector skills councils such as ConstructionSkills, the largest Work Based Learning and NVQ training providers ranging from Carter & Carter, Protocol Skills, JHP, TBG through to Niche Providers and FE Colleges. When a job seeker comes to FE Careers they see a true reflection of the whole FE sector. This is what our job seekers want. We also have the widest spread of specialist FE and Work Based Learning recruitment agencies.

ìWe have been having a bit of a tally up, which just started out of interest ñ but had very interesting results. According to our calculations for well over six months we have had the most amount of FE and NVQ related job adverts per month, every month - even more than the free sites. Which is absolutely fantastic, even organisations that have free advertising sites advertise their jobs on FE Careers!

To celebrate their third birthday FE Careers are going to launch three new websites this month. Gavin explains ìWe have continually enhanced FE Careers to meet the growing needs and interests of our visitors, job seekers and advertisers. All of the services are for FE, by FE. However, the online universe has changed dramatically in the past three years. When we first developed FE Careers we still had to worry about upload speeds of visitors using dial up!

ìWe are so lucky to be alive during this period of great change - the blurring of new media into media is an exciting process. So watch out over this month, we are launching three new websites to celebrate our third birthdayÖ. And I am so excited about these new sites, actually more excited than the fact that itís our birthday. The new sites have been created again for the specialist Further Education industry, two of the website concepts have not been thought of before in FE. We talked to quite a few design agencies, who basically said that these ideas couldnít be done. Not yet anyway! So instead we went to a start up design consultancy who completely bought our vision and went crazy developing itÖ but like all good birthday presents we are going to keep them a surprise until weíve blown the candles out and itís unwrapping time.î

ìI think I am probably not ready to celebrate until the new sites are launched. We are sponsoring the Association of Learning Providers annual conference at the end of the month and we have to make sure that everything is ready for this big event. I canít wait to let you see the new sites; theyíre going to cause a bit of a stir in FE!

ìOn behalf of FE Careers, I want to say a huge thank you for the support, loyalty and input from our advertisers, visitors and industry partners. We would not be here without you. Together we are changing FE, raising its profile in the industry, in Government and in the homes of ordinary people. I want to say a huge thank you, you made this happen. FE is no longer the overlooked middle child of the education sector. Cinderella is going to the ball and she knows how to party.î

Weíll keep you updated on what is going to burst out of the FE careers birthday cake!