Skills

skills Bringing Careers

Education to Life

The South London Careers Hub was launched earlier this year and is the latest addition to a national network of Careers Hubs across England. The Hub supports secondary schools and colleges across 5 boroughs (Kingston, Richmond, Merton, Sutton & Croydon) with the broad aim to link businesses to secondary schools and colleges to help support and create better jobs and pathways for young people, helping to ensure a pipeline of homegrown talent, meet skills gaps and promote careers in growth sectors.

On Wednesday 8th June, the careers hub partnered with Kingston & Merton Chamber of commerce to host an in-person networking event for local careers leaders, stakeholders and businesses at the fabulous Warren House Hotel. It was great to see the passion and support for careers and employability is so strong, with over 60 attendees, the event was opened by the new Mayor of Kingston Cllr Yogan Yoganathan with speeches from the careers hub team and the CEO of Kingston Chamber, Forbes Low.

The aim of the event was to create a platform to improve links between local businesses and schools and colleges to create lasting connections that will ultimately improve the local careers provision, increasing opportunity and ensuring sustainable employment across the Borough.

For the schools and colleges that attend, these networking opportunities allow careers leaders to widen their network and make new connections with local businesses and employers.The businesses get to increase their local network, raise awareness of their business, and play an active role in improving the employability and work readiness of young people.

One of the ways that the Hub supports local careers provision is by recruiting Enterprise Advisors to work directly with a school or college in their local area to help bridge the gap between the world of work and education. Enterprise Advisors are business professionals who volunteer their time to strategically support a school or colleges senior leadership team to develop and evaluate their careers plan.

Forbes Low, Chief Executive of Kingston Chamber of Commerce has volunteered to join the Hub network as an Enterprise Advisor and is working with Chessington School.

The value of this relationships was clearly visible at the recent whole school careers day at Chessington school, held on 13th July. Not only did Forbes attend the day, he joined forces with another chamber member, Claire Harrison of West 9 Design to deliver a workshops on careers in the creative sector. Along with Kingston’s local Enterprise Coordinator Amanda McLoughlin, they also used their existing network to connect the school with other businesses who provided workshops and attended the careers fair.

Forbes said ‘It was my pleasure to work with the Careers Leader, Patrick Browne and the school. They worked so hard to give their students a glimpse of what business sectors are available. Be it the NHS, the Royal Navy, to banking, IT, construction, and police (the use of the handcuffs was particularly popular!). These are early days of the programme but it was encouraging seeing the various business sectors wanting to reach out to students.’

Other businesses who supported also shared their feedback and enthusiasm for the event “Our team has enjoyed Chessington School today. Being young them self they were soon past their initial nervousness and we’re talking to the students passionately about IT and apprenticeships.”

Katerina Damcova, IQ in IT

If you would like to support local careers education in the South London Area, join in with events, share your career journey or become an Enterprise Advisor, please do get in touch with Amanda on Amanda.McLoughlin@

southlondonpartnership.co.uk