Focus on careers

This week there has been a focus on careers in the Senior School with talks on employability and careers from PwC and the NHS.

The PwC presentation, for girls in Year 11-Upper Sixth, was given by two members of the company’s Graduate and School and College Leaver programmes. The presenters began by talking about their own backgrounds and experience, before going on to speak about what they now did at PwC.

One of the representatives had gone straight into PwC after completing her A Levels, and the other had completed a Law Degree at University prior to signing up for the PwC graduate programme. It was really interesting for the girls to gain an understanding of how different routes into work can lead to the same opportunities.

As a group they then considered employability skills and the PwC presenters talked about what employers are really looking for in terms of interview skills and how you can impress through an application.

Lower down the school, in their careers lessons, Year 9 students have been considering the types of careers on offer to them and exploring a wide range of industries. As part of this they are participating in the “Step into the NHS Schools’ Competition”, for which (either individually or in small groups) the girls have to choose an NHS career that interests them and create a job description and an advert to tell their friends and other young people about it. The idea behind the competition is to promote the fact that there is much more to working for the NHS than being a doctor or nurse. In fact, as the speaker who came to talk to the girls informed them, there are more than 350 different careers available, so roles to suit a wide variety of people with many different interests and skills.

The NHS representative spoke to the girls about current public health issues and trends and explained that the NHS is a hugely complex organisation that has to react quickly in order to ensure it can cope with a variety of demands and pressures.

Through the presentation the girls were taken on a patient journey of a young person who had been brought into A&E after breaking their leg. The girls had to think about all the different people who would be involved in their care from the point at which an ambulance was called, through to them being discharged.

Both of these talks served as a fantastic opportunity for the girls to gain an insight into the workings of an organisation, and provided them with some really useful advice as they think about the next stages of their lives.