Richard Lamplough is founder of My Employment Passport and MD of Won't Ever Be Ltd. Richard has a background as a community connector, linking hard-working, reliable young people with employers (who acknowledge there might be some support issues to take on board in the early weeks) keen to find hard-working reliable employees.
Having gained two years’ experience as a job coach between 1994 and 1996, Richard became an Employment Project Manager for a voluntary organisation in an Inner London borough. Between 1997 and 2006 his tender proposals for employment support initiatives secured substantial amounts of funding from local government, the DWP and charitable trusts.
In 2014, Richard went "back to his roots" in the county where he grew up, dividing his time between a community drop-in centre in Horsham, an FE college in Crawley and a special school in Crawley. When he waved goodbye to his West Sussex pals at the start of 2020, he was proud to say that approximately twenty-five young people had moved into paid employment in the previous six years. He was also proud of the fact that he had built the foundations of an initiative from a point of zero funding in 2014 to a place today where it now has sustainable financial backing from West Sussex County Council.
The seeds of My Employment Passport were sown in 2010, the time Richard started recording video clips of young people in work, as well as taking still photographs. The more employment courses he ran, the more he weaved these resources into his sessions to inspire the young people he supported. A pilot version appeared in 2021, and for the next three years, Richard relied on one of his trusted mottos: Reflect, Adapt and Improve, to offer what you see today: an innovative, ground-breaking career programme that can be delivered by schools, colleges, day services, the voluntary sector and parents' groups nationally.
