Firstly I would like to start by welcoming all of our staff and students back to Medtia after the summer break. We started our week with a training day on Monday, which was largely spent preparing the building for our young people after the building works that have been completed over the summer. The building is looking fantastic and I would like to take this opportunity to thank Alan and Dan in the site management team, along with our team of builders and workmen who have worked so hard over the past few weeks to ensure that our building is fit for purpose..

Tuesday was an exciting day for me as our brand new college officially opened and we welcomed out first cohort of 12 young people – all eager to work hard and move into employment over the next year. As you will know from my previous blogs, we have spent the past 12 months going through an application process with the Department for Education to open as an independent college and our hard work has paid off as we finally opened our doors this week.

The young people have had a busy start to the year, with a real focus on preparing for what is coming next for our students.

This year the employability pathways have relocated to the top floor of Medtia, to create the Employability Hub…here are a few pictures of our new space..

We have also introduced a new uniform for our interns – if you haven’t got yours yet, please just contact Lesley on reception for an order form..

Our students this week have spent time getting to know each other, discussing their own expectations and what success will look like to them. They have been writing CVs, cover letters and talking about the skills and qualities employers are looking for. In addition, the students have been getting more practice and understanding of how to use job search sites as this can be daunting at first!

In other news, our Future Finders students are in the process of creating social media pages to raise their profile with local and regional employers. They are working with their job coaches to use social media to keep you up to date with recent successes, give general information about themselves and the course and use Facebook/Twitter/Linkedin to contact employers and to tell them all about our college and their aspirations as a collective to gain paid employment. These pages will be live soon and I will share links in my next blog.

I would like to wish all of our students the best of luck for their first week at work! I am sure they will have a huge impact within their place of work.

Over the coming weeks, our job coaches will be meeting with parents and carers to discuss our expectations for the year and to start to plan for a life of employment for our students. It is imperative that families support us to raise aspirations and to support our young people into the world of work.

Have a fantastic weekend,

Daniel
Director of Employment & Co Head of Site at Medtia Square

You can view our previous blog entries here

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