- It allows us to inform students about what Digital careers are like with the hope that this informs their future decisions.
- It allows us to support educators to guide their students in the subject decisions they might need to make to move into digital careers.
- It allows our people to give something back to their local communities.
Using the Employer Standards tool was very beneficial as it confirmed our strengths but also highlighted that we could do more.
It is very helpful to understand where we are now, what others are doing, and how we might accelerate our efforts to support more young people.
We identified that we could always do more with educator and parent outreach.
We also saw how we might increase engagement within our offices with more visits from schools to see what it is like to work in a city centre digital office.
AND Digital is a digital consultancy and professional services company focused on closing the digital skills gap. We work with leading brands across the UK and Europe to build great digital products, while at the same time building capability within our clients and the wider community. We offer careers outreach from our offices across England, Scotland, and the Netherlands.
Increasing the pipeline of young talent choosing to come into the health service is critical in order to create a thriving and sustainable NHS for the future. Therefore, Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust established a dedicated Schools Engagement Team to focus on the delivery of quality careers outreach locally through the BrigHT Futures programme.
The team promote career opportunities in all NHS professions with the ability to specifically focus on those areas suffering from skills shortages, such as nursing, midwifery and allied health professionals, in a bid to attract a wider range of talent into the future workforce. "The NHS workforce is under significant pressure with challenges in recruitment and retention," explains Head of Engagement, Culture and Organisational Development Elaine Pope. "So from a workforce perspective, we have to do things differently around education outreach and supporting our local communities and young people."
"The Standards have provided a comprehensive way to review our current engagement with the education sector, identifying what we are doing well and areas for improvement," sums up Pope. She adds that using the Standards has also helped the Trust align its organisational objectives with its education outreach, building in frameworks to ensure any outreach work reaches a high standard of quality.
Pope highlighted that "The framework has enabled us to use best practice to deliver meaningful, high-quality opportunities in a standardised way, knowing that we can also measure how we develop and improve".
The Standards assessment identified important areas where there is room for improvement, such as in identifying young people from underrepresented groups who may need more support and measuring impact.
"The Standards helped us identify that we need to extend our engagement, committing long term and investing time with the same school(s) over a period of time," Pope adds. This has already resulted in the Trust identifying three schools in 'opportunity areas' closest to its largest site and inviting nine teachers onsite for teacher encounters.
Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust is an acute and community Trust providing services to over half a million patients annually. It employs more than 6,500 members of staff.
As a company that is building schools around the country, education outreach is embedded into the culture at Morgan Sindall Construction, says social value manager Norma Odain-Hines. In addition to giving back to society, much of the value gained comes down to plugging pervasive skills gaps, by building awareness of and interest in the range of jobs available in construction. "There are massive skills shortages in construction and people aren't aware of the great opportunities within the sector," Norma explains. "It's opening students' eyes to the fact we have more than 180 types of jobs available, and that the jobs are ever-evolving. We need to open young people's eyes to the opportunities available."
Norma believes using the Employer Standards helps bring focus and ensure the company's education outreach remains fit-for-purpose in a fast-changing world. Engaging in the Standards also helps the business to continue to develop in its approach to careers and education outreach, and highlights gaps for improvements, she adds. Even for the best businesses, there is room to learn and evolve.
For Morgan Sindall Construction, the Standards particularly highlighted a need to "tighten up on our evaluation," says Norma. Going forward, she plans to improve evaluation by putting in place a more robust data collection process, allowing quick and simple feedback from teachers during or immediately after an activity.
She adds that another benefit of clear and codified Standards is that it makes education engagement easier for her colleagues and supply chain partners (Morgan Sindall Construction works with its supply chain to deliver activity at a local level) to understand. "It makes it easy for them, and that means we can do our best in delivering what schools and colleges actually require," she concludes.
Morgan Sindall Construction is part of Morgan Sindall Group, a construction and regeneration management company with more than 6,000 employees.
