Getting Career Ready - A Guest Blog Post from Ellie at Oldmachar Academy

Getting Career Ready - a Guest Blog Post from Ellie at Oldmachar Academy

Today’s blog post comes from Ellie Stewart, a student at Oldmachar Academy who attended a Masterclass at Elevator supported by Lucia and Simon from Team Elevator. Over to Ellie!

What is career ready?

Career Ready is a charity set up and governed by senior business leaders to help raise students aspirations and bridge the gap between education and work, giving pupils access to real experience and develop their social mobility.

I personally have enjoyed meeting new people, my mentor, and the masterclasses.

Communication and Networking

I thoroughly enjoyed the communication and networking masterclass at Elevator with Lucia and Simon, who made the masterclass even more enjoyable! We took part in a range of activities. 

As a workplace visit, Elevator UK is a terrific workspace, very creative, open and inspirational. In the first session, we were asked to get into height order without speaking - it was quite difficult to do without communicating. So in order to complete the task we used our initiative and moved each other around to make sure everyone was in the right position and in the right order. 

In the second activity, we were arranged into groups to create a Castle! We didn't have to do this from scratch, behind a board on a table was a castle made out of "wood” and “stone”. In our groups, we then had to make a copy of the castle ourselves, trying to make it as identical to the one that we had seen, but was hidden. However, as if memorising the castle's appearance wasn't enough, only one person from each team was allowed to go up and look at the castle. This was quite a challenging activity trying to memorise, communicate back to the team what the castle looked like and build the castle.   

In this activity, I was responsible for constructing the main castle with another person from my team and the rest of the team made up the smaller parts and individually went back and forth to memorise the castle. My group's end result was that our castle wasn't identical to the one already made, however, we improvised by making comments such as how our castle had more protection around it etc. 

The third and final activity was to create an Elevator Pitch about ourselves. This was to be a one-minute pitch that we shared with the rest of the group. We included things such as our name, our school, our personal strengths, an interesting fact, why we applied to the Career Ready Programme and what we have enjoyed so far about it.  

My Elevator Pitch

My personal elevator pitch went along the lines of; 

My name is Ellie Stewart, I'm currently in education at Oldmachar Academy, one of my strengths is that I am a good listener, I am interested in the Career Ready Programme as it is an excellent way to allow students to get the real life experience before going into the ‘world of work’ and also what I have enjoyed the most out of the Programme so far is getting to know my mentor Sarah Munro, Senior Marketing Executive at Anderson Anderson & Brown LLP.

I really enjoyed the communication and networking masterclass. The thing that helped me the most was learning the basic skills on ways to communicate with other people. The thing that I personally am going to do more of is not be as shy, I learned that when meeting new people, you need to give the best impression possible. Finally, I enjoyed taking the opportunity to develop my communication and networking skills.