Its all about Careers and Apprenticehsips this week!

This week its both National Careers Week and National Apprenticeship Week. What are they both about? The aim of both is to raise awareness with students, teachers and parents the range of opportunities available for students to consider for their future employment, education and apprenticeships. 

As you would probably guess, National Careers Week has a wider focus, to encourage schools, colleges and students to be involved in careers activities. The aim of this is to encourage students to actively think about their options, and how what they are currently studying can give them relevant skills, experience and knowledge.  Not only this, but it’s a good chance to actually think about the very wide range of options available in every career area – how about these suggestions for WUC course areas, (some may need further study!)

Art and design - model maker, landscape designer, graphics

Agriculture – agronomist, agricultural finance roles, business development, land surveyor

Horticulture – botanist, field trials coordinator or assistant, retail management, commercial growing

Floristry – retail management, florist for a 5* hotel, supplier, logistics

Animal management – RSPCA officer, veterinary care assistant, dog trainer

Sport – personal trainer, gym manager, physiotherapist or sports therapist

Countryside – park ranger, volunteers manager, warden

There are many other related careers too that previous students have gone onto do after their course. If you want to talk options through, get in contact!

National Apprenticeship Week is more focussed on raising the profile of apprenticeships, as you would guess from its name! Apprenticeships are an excellent way to develop your qualifications while you are getting experience doing the job, and getting paid. What’s not to like about that combination? And the qualifications available are not just low level ones, with degree apprenticeships becoming more available in certain career areas. And even if there is not a degree apprenticeship available in what you want to do yet, you can still get level 3 qualifications, which are equivalent to A levels/Extended Diplomas. And with a level 3, you can look at foundation degrees as one way to develop your qualifications further – these degrees are aimed at developing work skills whilst developing your academic knowledge and skills too.

As you may know already, WUC offers apprenticeships too.  The apprenticeship team would be happy to talk through your options, and tell you what vacancies they know about. You can also access all the apprenticeship vacancies on the national apprenticeship website.

So, having read this far, what can you do this week to develop your career planning more? Here are some suggestions,

Talk to your tutor/careers adviser (me!) about what you could do.

Talk to the college apprenticeship team about this option, even if its just to help decide about doing one or not!

Look at some employers websites to find out more about what they do and what opportunities they might have, now and in the future.

Write or update your CV.

And finally, whatever you do, don’t just ‘ignore’ your future options – there are so many positive ones to consider, its really worth spending time making sure you get the choice right!