Another week passes by at an extraordinary rate.

Monday saw Apple Education come and visit our site. They were very impressed by how we use their technologies in numerous ways and by how ePorfolios are used in Future Finders to evidence learning and progress. They were given a tour of our building before moving to the Atrium where they saw how Mr Morrison is creating QR codes that link to instructional videos of how to use different tools and equipment in the café. Very impressive.

This week we have an update on our students from our job coach, Anne-Marie..

In class this week we have been updating our CVs to include all our new experiences and we have been looking at Job Searching. We have worked out that we have already been back in college for 12 weeks – it is all going by so fast. Then we looked at how long we had left and in that time, find work – when we broke it down, taking away all the half terms and holidays it isn’t that long at all – 21 weeks!

So, we have been discussing when we should be looking for work and how to use our time effectively. We decided that although college is 9am-3pm, our job searching doesn’t have to end there – we can do this at home too, even if it means some of us will have to leave our games consoles while we look for jobs! We can take our CVs out with us when we go out with family and hand them out to our local shops and businesses.

We also discussed social media and how many jobs are posted there – get looking and you’ll be surprised how many jobs you will find posted that just need a simple DM to the company to express an interest and apply.

As readers of this blog know, Monday to Wednesday are our placement days and we have all been working hard this week:

Matthew is loving his time at the Clean Plate Kitchen where he is learning new skills each and every week! This week there was a focus on baking and you may have spotted already him on Facebook..

I am pretty sure Matty’s Marvellous Cakes would have sold out before the end of the day, well done Matty! He has also been working hard on his customer service skills..

When I visited Matthew, he wanted me to mention Jason who had left a lovely comment under Collette’s Facebook post about Matty’s baking. If you remember, Jason was on placement at the Clean Plate Kitchen last year whilst he was on the Pre-Internship Pathway. Collette said it meant a lot to her to read it and they both wanted him to gain some recognition for posting..

“Well done Matty make us proud keep up good work”

A great example of supportive team work! Comments like this can make all the difference, well done Jason.

While we are talking about Jason, I will give you a brief update on what he has been up to at the busy new Guinness Partnership café. He is continuing to impress down at Guinness, improving his skills in serving customers and helping with preparing food. This week he has also helped a new member of staff to settle in..

This is Julie, our new Job Coach who will be based down at the Guinness Partnership supporting our young people. The relationships that she has already built with the staff and young people are amazing and she just ‘gets’ what we do! She is constantly trying to find ways to push our young people and improve their skills. Welcome to the team Julie!!!

Reece is still at dsgnuk and I called in to see him and find out what he has been up to – rather a lot!!

• being able to demonstrate his own skills within the workplace
• learning different programming languages such as PHP and MYSQL
• helping with typing up menus
• making contact forms for the company to be able to use in their business
• being able to demonstrate his own HTML knowledge, showing his understanding through creating websites
• using his CSS knowledge to be able to position objects and colour them in order to further demonstrate my knowledge within CSS
• being able to demonstrate his knowledge of Java by showing that he is able to alter style values, such as the left on the position and right on the position too..
• learning new skills under web development

We have used this information to update his CV and uploaded it to a jobs website….where he was matched to a potential opportunity and with a simple click of a button he had applied. Fingers crossed we hear back from the company soon! 

Over now to Lewis who is still working across 2 placements – we told you in last week’s blog (here) how his services have been requested again down at MMU working within their IT department and he has quickly settled back in. Keep up the good work Lewis, you’re doing an amazing job! 

The end of another busy week, rest up over the weekend and we will see you next week for another Future Finders instalment!

Next week sees the arrival of our new head Mrs Walton. I’m really excited to get the opportunity to work with her and I’m sure you’ll all give her the same warm welcome that I received when I started here.

I hope that you all have a great weekend

Mr Pidlyskyj
Deputy Head of College

Click here for this week’s news from Graham

You can view our previous blog entries here