Community members are seeking second or even third jobs to make ends meet as the cost-of-living crisis bites.

Employment charity Resource reports a growth in clients needing additional income to keep their heads above water. It also anticipates rising demand from people who decided to retire during the pandemic but have found their pensions stretched by soaring inflation.

Resource once focused on those out of work but now also supports the “unhappily employed”, who seek a change of career or better paid positions.

Examples cited by Resource chief executive Victoria Sterman include “teachers coming to us saying their jobs are too stressful”. The charity has also been helping an electrician with a bad back who wants a less physical occupation.

A breakdown of Resource’s activities by researcher Carol Rosenberg shows greater calls on its services from the under 35s and a preponderance of female clients in recent years.

Ms Sterman believes the latter trend reflects both changes in working practices during the pandemic, which have increased the options for home working, and the need to bring in extra household income in difficult times.

Also back on the rise is the number of non-British clients. “There are more Israelis after a gap after Brexit and then Covid. Israeli companies here are actively recruiting.”

Unsurprisingly, Resource is also starting to receive requests from Ukrainians who came to the UK to flee the war.

As an example, Ms Sterman said that through the charity’s connections, a woman who arrived last June with her 12-year-old son and needed to find work urgently had been helped to secure a role as a housekeeping assistant with Jewish Care. “She even gave us a donation to show her gratitude.”

There had also been an uptick in “harder to help” clients with mental health or physical disability issues.

Around 750 people approached Resource for help in 2022 and those assisted were fairly evenly split between the charity’s full programme — including one to one adviser support — and people attending individual events and workshops.

Its success rate for helping clients into employment over the past few years is about 70 per cent and Ms Sterman contends that the true figure is probably higher as “some get jobs and don’t tell us”.

A significant proportion of demand is from North London and the Hertfordshire suburbs — “NW11 is our biggest postcode at the moment”.

Helping those already in work but looking to change jobs has necessitated the charity becoming more flexible in its hours.

And armed with a £112,000 Wohl Legacy grant over three years, Resource is targeting a 50 per cent increase in the numbers it assists.

It intends to appoint a fundraising director in a bid to further boost revenue and is adopting a new marketing strategy.

“There are two deterrents to people coming to us,” Ms Sterman explained. “They have never heard of us or they have heard of us but think you have to be needy [to receive support].”

Clients hailed from a variety of professional backgrounds. “We are helping a rabbi who doesn’t want to be a rabbi anymore.”