OxLEP Skills are encouraging business people to ‘Give an Hour’ of their time to inspire the workforce of the future.
National Careers Week (#NCW2019) takes place from 4– 9 March 2019 and is a celebration of careers guidance and free resources in education across the UK. The aim is to provide a focus for careers guidance activity at an important stage in the academic calendar to help support young people leaving education.
Linking in with this, The Careers & Enterprise Company are running a campaign called ‘Give an Hour’ which sets out to encourage business people to give a small amount of their time to visit a school and talk to students about their career choices and pathway. The campaign is particularly encouraging those from busy small and medium sized enterprises, who may not be able to spare the time to attend longer careers events, to see the value they can bring in just an hour, for example by giving a careers talk or taking part in a ‘human library’ speed career-networking event.
Could you get involved? In just an hour, you could make a difference to the choices a young person makes about their future. Was there someone in your life that made a difference to the career choices you made? Could you be that someone for a young person today? Could you open the eyes of a young person to an exciting or fulfilling career that they didn’t even know existed?
You could be the person who changes the life of a young person, just by showing them what is possible. Inspiration comes in many forms – by sharing your story, you could inspire a young person to follow your path.
Julia Cook, clothes designer and founder of Chipping Norton-based businesses Tickittyboo and Tickittyshake (pictured above) took part in a ‘human library’ at her local school, a fun and fast-paced careers networking event where groups of students chat with volunteers from business (the ‘books’) for a few minutes at a time to learn from all the knowledge inside each ‘book’ about their particular job, workplace and sector.
Julia said: “I enjoyed it and always like to be involved with the schools especially with creative workshops and helping kids understand what's involved in building a career and the starting out in the work place. I employ 5 children from Chipping Norton School too, so it was good to understand their thought process and hear their opinions today.”
There are lots of benefits to your business too – becoming known as a local employer, promoting the opportunities you provide and potentially finding your next Apprentice!
To find out how you could get involved in our work with schools, please email [email protected] or complete and return our Business Interest Form.
