Thinking about a future career can be daunting for anyone. This is especially so for our programme’s disadvantaged teenagers. Thanks to fantastic training from Skills Development Scotland (SDS), Young Glasgow Talent’s mentors have the tools to help their young people find, grow and use their talents. Through the innovative and creative technology featured in the My World of Work website, SDS is ensuring inspiration and information for our young people at every stage of their career. From exploring their preferences, to planning their learning, to establishing their first steps in that industry.
SDS are providing supported access of their resources to our mentors and young people. They recently presented an interactive session at our partner’s, Wheatley Housing, premises. All mentors invited were taken through the phenomenal features of the facility. Attendees were hugely impressed by the invaluable tools available to each of their young people.
My World of Work is a brilliant and innovative careers resource. Aimed at young people, it comprehensively provides “the help you need for the career you want”! It serves students the opportunity to explore all career options available to them. It encourages the identification of strengths, ambitions and skills, before outlining the educational pathways, Apprenticeships and vacancies to achieve their aspirations.
As well as providing the training facilities for the day, mentors from Wheatley Housing also attended the event. Sharon McIntyre, Trisha McShane and Donna-Marie Costello have been fabulous mentors for their young people and great supporters of MCR Pathways Young Glasgow Talent programme. In a show of further commitment by Wheatley, Donna-Marie and three other Wheatley employees have recently transferred to work with MCR for a year on our revolutionary Talent Tasters. It’s yet another amazing example of Wheatley doing everything they can for our Young Glasgow Talent campaign! This is on top of their Talent Tasters and commitment for 100 employees to sign up to mentor our young people.
The SDS host for the day was Keith. He talked all our mentors through the highly intuitive website. Including the best ways to use it, how it works and why a tool like this can be vital for a young person’s career development. We’ve chosen the key highlights from Keith’s pearls of wisdom. For anyone wanting to help a young person decide what path is right for them, this is the site for you!
Get Signed Up!
You can use www.myworldofwork.co.uk without having to create an account. However there are many advantages of taking a few seconds to sign up.
It helps young person auto-complete some of their CV! It also allows you to save some of the quizzes, personality tests, forms and CV’s you might want to take a break with before completing.
“About Me”
The “About Me” tool was very effective. Filled with different personality tests, this section determines your personality type based on respected psychological research. Your results then populate career suggestions. Absolutely fantastic for young people unsure yet of what career is for them. Career suggestions include various apprenticeships, job profiles, industries, career paths and many more options. You can actually choose which tools (there are 6 to chose from) influence your results. It’s really comprehensive!
You could find out that your young person is a leader, organiser or investigator. Careers that suit such qualities will be highlighted. Those unsure of their preferred career will find help and support in moving forward. You can download your personality report as a pdf, too. Perfect for working through everything with your mentee.
“Strengths” Tool
This was another one of the “diagnostic” tools which really impressed attendees! As Keith explained, this tool explains to the viewer “How Well I Do Things?” “How Often I Do Things?” and “How Much Do I Enjoy Things?”. These answers are based on a 72 question quiz! This can be long for a young person to fill in. So signing up and saving your answers after you’ve had enough means you can come back any time.
The results from the Strengths tool also drives results into career options. Showing how our young people’s strengths can be converted to the workplace! The career suggestions cover every job role you could imagine. They then link to the different qualifications and skills you need to enter the field, while the appropriate colleges, universities and UCAS sites are also provided.
CV Assistance
The CV help on My World of Work is first rate. It’s partly populated by results from the tools outlined above. It also takes into account ambition, skills, education and experience. It breaks CV writing into sections. Strengths results even provide synonyms to help you fill in your personal statement! It’s a great, non threatening way to start looking at how to produce your first CV to apply for your first job role.
Keith had some great advice which was “throw everything you can think of in your cv” and then refine. A great place to start for young people without a lot of experience.
What This Means for Mentors
Our mentors were really impressed by what they heard.
One point of interest was noting that there’s an SDS Coordinator in every Glasgow School! You can reach out to them as a parent, carer, mentor or other interested party if you’d like to learn more. All mentors can meet their SDS coordinator in school should they wish to. Also, you can speak to your Pathways Coordinator to get access to a computer during your mentoring session. So you can utilise the My World of Work site!
We’d like to say a huge thank you to Keith and Skills Development Scotland for presenting this phenomenal session. This will have a huge impact on our young people and their career and study outcomes. Thanks of course to those mentors that made it to the info session. Your continued dedication for your young person is absolutely inspiring! Thanks also to our fantastic Pioneering Partners, Wheatley Housing, for hosting this great event!
“Today’s event was extremely valuable. This will help me, with my mentee, to discover her real skills.” – Ann Tyson, Mentor of S4 pupil at St Mungo’s
“My World of Work will be a very useful tool for my mentee as she is unsure of exactly what she wants to do as a career. Great to find out about this as my mentee doesn’t know it exists.” – Donna Marie Costello, Mentor of S4 pupil at St Andrews.
“Although as individuals we may have a lot of experience in a certain field, this opens up the information to fit the mentee perfectly. It appears that regardless of the education, confidence and experience of the mentee, the programme seems easy to navigate to the level they require.” – Kathy Clark, Mentor of S3 pupil at Springburn Academy.
“Today’s event was extremely interesting and informative and certainly inspires me to follow it up online.” – Kirsteen Ballantine, Mentor of S3 pupil at Smithycroft.
Get Involved!
Can you help a young person realise their full potential and be defined by their talent and not their circumstances? More disadvantaged young Glaswegians are signing up for mentors to help them overcome barriers and inequality to be all that they can be. Can you help them? One hour a week and a willingness to put a young person first are all you need. You’ll make and experience a life-changing difference in helping a young person to find, grow and use their talents. MCR Pathways will provide all the training and support you need to make a huge difference. We can’t wait to hear from you. GET INVOLVED.
