It’s that time of year when we come up with fantastic ideas and resolutions for the year ahead. Unfortunately, these ideas and resolutions, which seemed so fantastic in 2019, will have been forgotten very early on in 2020 The reason for this is that we tend to come up with woolly, general thoughts rather than a real plan for change.
How about making this year different? If you really want to change your business, your work/life balance, your effectiveness or any other aspect of your life, you have to think through what you want to achieve.
What are your timescales? What are your specific goals? How will you measure change? What resources will you need? Who do you need to help you?
Once you have thought through all the aspects of your idea write them down so you have a point of reference – and then DO IT!
By taking the time to plan you will find it much more likely that you will keep your resolutions and move forward.
I had the privilege of spending the day with business and engineering students at Strode College in Street as part of their Employer Ready Event.
The idea of the day was to, firstly, introduce students to the world of employment in a very practical way by spending time with business people and, secondly, to get feedback on what business people thought was important to cover in the new T level qualifications.
In case you are not aware of the T level qualifications, they are designed to run parallel to A levels but offer a more ‘technical’ and practical form of qualification – generally with some form of placement built in.
Companies have often complained that youngsters do not have the skills they need to be productive employees from the outset. So the T levels are a proposed answer to this complaint.
Strode is alsovery involved in offering apprentiships – which as we all know are a great way of offering on the job training.
The first part of the day was working with 16-17 year old business and engineering students on a project exploring how they might go about making Strode a carbon neutral college. What were the things that needed to be concidered and where would they start?
Although there were some students who were more engaged than others – by the end of the session everyone was taking part in presenting the solutions they had come up with.
The afternoon was spent talking to the degree level students (I had no idea that Strode was linked with Plymouth university and offering degrees) and these more mature students were very focussed and clear on what they wanted from their future careers.
We then had a discussion on the T level business qualifications and what we felt were the modules that would be most important to businesses.
All in all I found the day to be a very positive experience and I was glad to be able to offer some insight into the business perspective.
If you have the opportunity to be involved in something similar I would urge you to take it!
