CAREER expert and star of Channel 4’s The Fairy Jobmother Hayley Taylor was in Salisbury on Wednesday.

Taylor was a guest speaker at Aster Communities and Synergy Housing customer conference held at Salisbury City Hall, which was attended by about 175 people.

The event, called Growing Together, had a theme of employment and the aim was to help customers living in properties owned by housing associations in the south to get back to work.

Taylor gave a motivational talk about how she got to her position despite a difficult upbringing, her husband being made redundant, being threatened with having their house repossessed and having a nervous breakdown.

“My life experience has got me to where I am,” she said. “I think it’s important for people to see I am a person who has lived through adversity.”

Taylor rebuilt her career by volunteering at a charity shop and mentoring young unemployed people there. “I was motivating them and telling them they could be whatever they wanted to be. I was putting trust in them when some of them had never been shown trust,” she said.

Following her success with the youngsters, who all left to go into work, she was asked to run a new course for the organisation they were sent from. “I work with unemployed people every day,” she said. “And the work I do doesn’t mean I have a television camera in front of me every day.”

Taylor gave guidance to those who went to the conference and they were also able to take part in a variety of workshops.

“People need to start to look at themselves, look at their skills and look at their options, to be realistic and not look at what the wage is,” she said. She stressed the importance of volunteering to get back into paid work and told job-hunters to consider two part-time jobs instead of a fulltime job.

Jo Savage, group services director for the Aster Group, said: “Helping customers looking to find employment to develop new and existing skills to support their journey back into work is one of our top priorities – particularly when changes to the Welfare Reform system are having such an impact on social housing customers across the UK.”