Liverpool career guidance and coaching charity Career Connect appoints Sheila Clark as its first-ever female chief executive. Tony McDonough reports

Career Connect has announced Sheila Clark has its new chief executive.

She is the first female CEO of the charity which has been in existence for 20 years. She has been part of the team since its launch and steps up into the role having served as deputy chief executive. She replaces  Barry Fletcher who has moved to the Youth Futures Foundation.

Career Connect is one of a number of organisations helping to deliver Liverpool City Region Careers Hub. Launched in 2018, the Careers Hub works with all 137 secondary schools and colleges across the region.

It supports them to better engage with employers, link curriculum learning to careers, and enable young people to gain experience of the workplace. In November it secured an extra £500,000 of funding from the Government.

Sheila has headed up HR, workforce development, quality improvement, commercial services and international business development in her role as deputy CEO. She will now lead the delivery of its five-year strategy.

Services offered by Career Connect include professional careers guidance and employer encounters in schools, support for young people who are at risk of or Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET).

Through its subsidiary company Achieve Northwest Connect (ANWC), it provides employment, education and training support to offenders and ex-offenders. A training centre also offers accredited training programmes for careers professionals. 

“Career Connect has a mission to drive social mobility by enabling more people to access and succeed in education, training and employment,” said Sheila.

“This mission, and our vision of a society where every individual realises their full potential, is at the heart of everything I will do as chief executive of our charity.

“To do this, we need to continue to be innovative, invest in our people, remain committed to equality and diversity, ensure our impartiality, and stay attuned to the needs of the people that we empower on their career journeys.

“We have an exciting future ahead as we grow our work in embedding User Voice into everything we do and developing our evaluation and research team, which will help us shape our services for maximum impact.