Once again, St Michael’s has enjoyed an amazing and busy Business and Enterprise week. Students across year 7, 8 and 9 have participated in a range of activities designed to develop their knowledge of the business world as well as to build their creative, entrepreneurial and problem solving skills. Working together for the college based challenge, years 7 and 8 form groups have created videos to highlight the needs of a charity of their choice while year 9 created a film to promote the college itself.
Activities over the course of the week have included careers workshops led by the college careers consultant, Young enterprise workshops and a competition led by MyBnk.
Here’s what some of the students have to say:
Young enterprise with year 9
On the Monday of B&E week, all sets of year 9 were chosen to take part in a Young Enterprise Course, which was formulated to help us gain a better vision of the world of Business, and more importantly, what this world held for each and every one of us in the future.
We started the day by getting to know our groups, both friend and volunteer. We conversed much about the options we had chosen for our GCSE subjects, the chemistry between them and how they would help us achieve, maintain and improve our dream careers once we reached them.
We were then asked to fill in a sheet with questions that involved the living standards we wanted to have in our later lives, and write the average price that would cost today. The greater our standards, the harsher the required budget would be. This exercise helped us further understand that we weren’t going to get to where we desired just by wanting it – and of course everyone knew that, but I think I speak for us all when I say that we didn’t expect our overall expenses to be so high! All of us came out with an amount that soared above £80,000, and we were all expecting to see numbers around half of that!
Our third activity linked cleverly to the previous one. As stated before, one must work hard and have the right salary to better their living standards. We were given a booklet to keep, which informed us about what our dream careers had in store in terms of: Expectations (What is required of us to be accepted) the potential Salaries and a general overview of what each of the jobs were. This made us ask ourselves, “Can we really meet these goals? Am I doing enough to secure this future?” And from this, we all obtained a more resilient respect for all other careers, and a strong acceptance of what we needed to do to be who we wanted to be.
Our volunteers did not only help us to understand the expectations we needed to work for from now. Subsequently after, we were given another questionnaire that was designed to help us understand who we were as people, and how this could be used to determine whether we would actually enjoy our jobs or not…
There are four main personalities, and each type will bring benefits for you in your career if you choose one which agrees with it. For example, a Pragmatist is someone who works best when using logical systems to produce tangible results. Their ideal jobs could be: A Chef, A Systems Administrator, A Military Officer, A Police officer, etc. Each person explored themselves with their unique and accurate descriptions to judge whether they’d really be happy with their vision of the future, or if they wished to change it. There is always time to change a dream, but by pursuing one or a few with determination, you will gain far more experience earlier than someone who can’t make their minds up. We were assured that we had the great gift: Time. I could easily go on and on about how great our experiences were, but this report would become an essay. What I can say is that the B&E has proved to be a vital part of everyone’s journey to find their footing in this world for as long as I’ve known it.
On the behalf of the year group and all the other classes who participated in this workshop, I would like to thank the volunteers for helping us, the next generation, better see our dream careers and understand exactly what we need to achieve them, no matter how big they were. They never beat us down for seeking an almost unimaginable budget to put to our names. We were told that “If you can dream it, you can have it; you mustn’t let others tell you otherwise, because it is they who would find it unrealistic and impossible to achieve… It doesn’t mean that YOU can’t do it…”
Oscar Asewando, 9HE
