Innovative approaches to employment and skills
30th October 2020
Skills for the future
You will have seen the headlines that young people have been hit hard by the pandemic. So it’s more important than ever that we all do everything we can to provide them with opportunities for further education and training, broadening their skills for an ever more competitive world.
We understand that Covid-19 has brought some unique challenges to delivering apprenticeships and training. But we’ve been blown away by the innovation shown by some of our contractors when it comes to delivering employment and skills outputs.
If you’re not sure how best to proceed with employment and skills in the current climate, why not contact your Framework Manager so we can advise how to maximise the benefits the frameworks can bring to your projects and your communities?
Keep reading for examples of how our contractors have continued to deliver employment and skills opportunities despite this year’s challenges.
Morgan Sindall
“Our virtual work experience programme was delivered in the 2020 summer term and involved 30 students from different schools coming together in mixed teams to work on a group design project in a virtual environment over a full school week. Support in the form of virtual talks and webinars was provided along the way by MSC employees, supply chain and consultants.
The programme ended with all 30 students presenting back to a judging panel their fully designed and costed design concepts, including innovative sustainable elements that generated an interesting debate on the value of sustainability in the built environment.
The attached document provides more detail and includes student feedback data and our Top 10 Takeaways.”
Galliford Try
“We have started creating a digital resource suite which we can use to engage with schools and colleges in order to still achieve ESPs. Filmed via a GoPro, we are filming 20-30 minute site tours and sending these across to schools. We are delivering the narration to the tour via a live Microsoft Teams meeting, screen sharing the video. This allows us to have that engagement and Q&A with students in real time and provide some genuine interaction .
We will next be filming careers overview sessions, highlighting some of the key roles on sites and in our offices, as well as some of the more unusual roles which students may not have heard of.
To accompany all our new digital resources, we have a survey for students and teachers which will allow us to accurately capture the number of students reached via each interaction, but also how impactful it has been.”
Sisk
“We’ve started to re-connect with schools and colleges since they went back and we’re planning virtual site tours and Q&A sessions. We’re also producing ‘talking heads’ style videos with our engineers.
We also recently hosted a work experience student, Mya, pictured left with supervisor Hamish”.
CR Reynolds
“For our current land-raising project at Brough, we undertook a Microsoft Teams-based construction and civils talk with year 5 students at Hunsley Primary School, in Brough. The talk was centred around two main elements, these being:
- construction site health and safety
- highlighting the different careers options available in the construction/civil engineering industry using content/video from the CITB Go Construct website.
We also launched a poster competition with the students to design their own construction health and safety poster.”
Kier Construction
“Since COVID-19 we have looked at innovative ways of supporting young people and to ensure that we continue to work towards achieving our Employment and Skills targets, activities that we have developed have included the following:
- Virtual site visits utilising GoPro cameras, 3D cameras, timelapse and drone footage
- Virtual careers fairs, providing electronic material i.e brochures and online information
- Recorded career insight information regarding construction and job specific
- Supported virtual mock interviews in schools and colleges
- Supported virtual work experience placements
- Pre-recorded Q & A sessions for information on careers in construction”
