Share a role and save a job

By KATIE TAYLOR FOR MAILONLINE
Updated: 11:10 EST, 16 March 2009

With unemployment fast approaching two million, one way to lessen the growing threat of redundancy could be job sharing.

Teamwork: Job sharer Samantha Marsh.

This is well established in the public sector and in a growing number of private companies, for example in law and business services.

But it can also work successfully in sectors such as manufacturing, which has suffered the highest number of job losses, with a further 140,000 posts expected to go this year, according to the Engineering Employers Federation.

Peter Thomson, director of flexible working practice consultancy Work Wise UK, says: 'In its simplest form, job sharing is what any shift system or 24-hour operation is about - as one person stops work, another takes over.

'In manufacturing, for example, the relatively routine jobs should be easy to share and that has to be preferable to losing skilled employees who must eventually be rehired at significant cost to the company.

'In many public sector organisations nearly all recruitment is carried out with the assumption that the role can be done on a jobshare basis.'

For the past 12 months Samantha Marsh has shared the role of PA to Chris Jones,