5/12/2025
Thu 22 Jan 2026 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM GMT | Online
Mainstream employment support has long aimed to help the long-term unemployed but has rarely achieved lasting change. Its focus on ‘fixing’ people, identifying problems and pushing them quickly into any job, often fails, especially for those who are invisible within traditional systems.
In the Centre for Employability Excellence’s first virtual seminar of 2026, we point to an alternative logic: building on people’s strengths. This means uncovering hidden skills, hopes and motivations buried by years of hardship.
Join us to explore a five-year EU-funded research project on how third-sector organisations, such as housing associations, apply this strength-building logic and to present the ‘Visibility Manual’ as a free resource that helps practitioners deliver it.
The seminar will be headed by two brilliant minds, Zografia Bika and Caterina M. Orlandi.
About Your Expert Speakers
Zografia Bika is Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK. Her research focuses on everyday entrepreneurship issues using a sociological lens, and has been published in journals such as Family Business Review, Regional Studies, Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, European Management Review, Sociological Review, Environment and Planning A, Journal of Development Studies, and Human Relations. Her ESRC-funded research won the Best ‘Family Business’ Paper Award at the 2018 US Academy of Management Annual Meeting and the 2020 US Family Firm Institute ‘Best Unpublished Research Paper’ Award. She has led the academic evaluation of the £10.8M EU Interreg-funded ‘Increase Valorisation Sociale’ project that aimed to boost enterprise training and job opportunities for thousands of social housing residents in England and France (2018-2023). An output from this applied research was nominated for the Best ‘Empirical Paper’ Award at the 2024 US Academy of Management Annual Meeting.
Caterina M. Orlandi received her PhD in Management from the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, in 2024. Her doctoral thesis explored the lived experiences of the ‘invisibles’ residing in deprived areas of England and France and those organisations which try to support them in their journey away from socio-economic exclusion. Her research spans urban sociology and organisation studies and has been presented at prestigious international academic conferences in Europe and the US such as EGOS, SASE, RENT and the US Academy of Management Annual Meeting. She was a member of the UEA team that carried out the academic impact evaluation of the £10.8M EU Interreg-funded ‘Increase Valorisation Sociale’ project.
Ready to challenge your assumptions and explore a better way forward?