In employment support and community services, trust is not a “nice to have,” it’s a necessity. People seeking help may be navigating homelessness, trauma, poor mental health, substance dependency, neurodivergence, or the lasting effects of contact with the criminal justice system.

“For each of the programmes that we implement, we make sure that lived experience is at the very heart of our delivery,” explains Tom Onions, Palladium UK Market Manager. But what does that mean in practice? It starts with staffing models that intentionally reflect the communities we serve.

“We’ve got really empathetic staff,” Onions explains. “And one way to ensure that empathy is to recruit teams who mirror their caseload as much as possible.”

The impact is both practical and relational. For the Refugee Employment Programme, which provided up to 18 months of tailored employment, language, and integration support for refugees arrived in the UK, Onions notes that “50% of our caseworkers had lived experience of being refugees themselves.”

That kind of experience can help with language, cultural understanding, and the reality of building a new life, advantages that can’t be fully replicated through training alone. It also changes the tone of difficult conversations. “When someone across the table has been through the experience themselves, it doesn’t make discussions about trauma easy, but it can make them a little bit easier.”

Similarly, across the Restart Scheme, which supports people who have been unemployed for 6 months or more, about 12% of the current staff actually benefitted from the Scheme themselves.

Lived experience, however, isn’t a single category and Onions is careful not to reduce it to a checkbox. Someone may have personal experience of a barrier; another may have supported a close family member through it; a third may have relevant experience in one domain (such as substance dependency) but not another (such as mental health). “All of this can matter,” says Onions.

“The goal is to hold quite a broad conception of lived experience while still being clear about what’s relevant to participants’ needs.”
So why is this approach especially critical in employment and community support?

Because the job search is rarely just about a CV. Services succeed when they understand both context and sequence. “It’d be incredibly frustrating if you’re homeless and you’ve got a caseworker telling you that all you need is a job,” Onions explains. “The first thing you’re thinking is ‘I need to know that the person in front of me is going to direct me to effective housing support and provide me with effective employment support.’” Lived experience can sharpen that judgment: it helps staff avoid getting the tone wrong and instead align support to what will actually move someone forward.

It also improves navigation of the wider ecosystem of help, what Onions describes as knowing the local map. If the person supporting you can relate to your circumstances, they may also be better positioned to connect you to “really helpful local services” that fit your life, from social groups to specialist support. That’s the connective tissue between employment support and the broader set of complementary services, such as local authority services, voluntary and community organisations, and health systems, that people often need at the same time.

Finally, lived experience can change how services communicate. “There’s a difference between the blurb about a programme and the words that actually make an impact,” Onions notes. When people have been let down before, or have had to repeat their story again and again, credibility is earned through language that feels real, specific, and grounded in understanding.

Designing services with lived experience at the centre is not about romanticising hardship or outsourcing expertise. It’s about building systems that recognise what participants already know: the barriers are complex, but people aren’t. “Our work,” says Onions, “Is to separate out the people from the barriers and then build support that truly fits.”