The Employer Engagement Project for Ethnic Minorities (EEPEM) grew out of Capital City Partnership’s wider mission to address inequality and poverty in Edinburgh. For years, CCP’s frontline work with employers, third-sector partners, and communities highlighted a persistent reality: ethnically diverse individuals and New Scots were still facing systemic barriers in employment, despite Scotland’s established equity standards. CCP’s own data showed that ethnically diverse groups’ meaningful employment outcomes in Edinburgh remain disproportionately low (CCP, 2023).
This was confirmed by wider evidence. In 2023, the employment gap between white and minority ethnic groups in Scotland stood at 13.8%, and poverty rates were disproportionately high for minority groups, with 50% of Asian or Asian British and 51% of Mixed, Black or Black British, and Other communities living in poverty (Poverty and income inequality in Scotland, 2025).
CCP had already been delivering inclusive initiatives such as the Whole Family Equality Project, which worked directly with ethnically diverse households to improve employability outcomes. Meanwhile, the Joined Up for Business team at CCP was supporting employers struggling to fill key positions by creating bespoke training programmes to help skilled individuals from ethnically diverse backgrounds move into those roles.
Building on the successes of both initiatives, the EEPEM emerged to bring these strands together to identify what are the systemic barriers that individuals face when looking for employment and what are the challenges employers face when recruiting New Scots and people form ethnic minority backgrounds.
Through the project, our aims are to:
Identify the pre-employment and workplace barriers faced by New Scots and ethnically diverse individuals, grounding this in their lived experiences.
Develop a comprehensive report for employers and policymakers, offering clear, actionable recommendations.
Engage with employers and support services to share our findings, raise awareness, and inspire action.
So far, we have delivered on the first two aims, and we are now moving into the third, engaging directly with employers and partners through a series of events. One of those events is Stories of Change on the 6th of October 2025 at the National Library Of Scotland (book here, spaces are limited). We have also developed a TOOLKIT that pulls together useful resources for employers to hire and retain ethnically diverse talent. The toolkit directly supports themes identified in the report.
We invite you to read the full report and explore its key findings. It highlights the barriers New Scots and ethnically diverse workers face in accessing, retaining, and progressing in employment and, just as importantly, the opportunities for employers and policymakers to make change. In this report our participants identified systemic issues which place significant barriers to gain, retain and progress employment, such as:
We also highlight a significant gap: while all employers track diversity at the recruitment stage, 45% of organisations that took part in the survey do not track pay progression, absenteeism, or professional development by ethnicity.
Read the full report here
Visit the Toolkit here
Copyright © 2025 | The Edinburgh Local Employability Partnership
