CareersCast Ep2

Welcome to Careerscast. This is the part of the WOW show where you get to ask the questions. We've lined up a great team of experts so let's go to our first question. What do you see as being the most important soft skills? How would you as an employer expect me to evidence my soft skills? So there are a ton of different soft skills out there that are all important to employers. I would say our top three are communication, resilience and teamwork. We often find that young people actually have these skills and use them every day but they don't always know how to talk to employers in their language or how to get their point across. Think about times you've worked well as part of a good team, either for a group project or even outside of school. If you're part of a sports club that you have to work of the team every weekend that could be a great example to use. When employees talk about teamwork they often mean the same thing, there'll just be specific objectives in place or targets the team has to meet. It's really difficult to get work experience, do you have any advice? It's really important to remember that the reason for the work experience is to get some insight into what it's like working with people and also to show you've really done your research and you understand what that particular allied health professional job is about. So the alternatives are perhaps consider some volunteering work, maybe look at some local charities or connecting with hospitals and find out what voluntary organisations support that hospital and spend some time with them if you can. Build your confidence working with people. Alternatively there are excellent wow show films that gives you real glimpses into each different type of allied health professional role or you could use the work experience toolkit on the Health Careers website. There's another website called I See The Difference which also has films on it and people really who do those jobs talking to you about what the good things are about it and the not so good things. Maybe connect with your friends and family networks and find out if anyone's doing those jobs so that you can have a bit of a chat with them about what they do and don't like so you can show when you apply that you've really thought carefully about it and you understand some of what the job involves. What are the routes in Well there's lots of different pathways in. You might choose to study a degree, you might choose to go to college, you might do an apprenticeship or you might just try and get straight into work. What's really important though is that you do your research and there's a couple of brilliant websites that are out there. There is our own one which is screenskills.com and that has all the different jobs that are available with descriptions of entry points and things that you can do right now to be building towards that first step into the industry. The other website that I want to mention is discovercreative.careers and that's got a really cool matchmaking tool on it where you can put in some of your details and it'll suggest some creative opportunities for you. So do your research screenskills.com and discovercreative.careers. The answer is no, you don't have to do an apprenticeship. There are many different go through the trade apprenticeship route but there's also a degree apprenticeship route where you can train into the management side via an apprenticeship. You can also become a trainee so you can do your degree with a company then sponsoring you so that you don't have to pay all of that uni debt and if you already have a degree then you can go down the graduate route where they train you up into different fields and many of these companies will offer a company car as part of a very good wage package for the degree and graduate route scheme. Due to agreement with other nations there is jobs available only for British candidates however there are a lot of jobs available for dual nationality candidates and at this current time we also have limited availability for Commonwealth candidates. If you need any more information about this go on to the Royal Navy website. There is as many different character types as there are jobs available in the industry whilst we recognise that certain departments might need people that are a little bit more up you know such as the assistant directors department you know they're a part of the floor management team so they need to be quite high energy but there's loads of roles that take really sort of quiet and detailed work such as VFX or drafting so I would like to encourage everyone irrespective of how confident or self-confident you feel that there is genuinely a job there for you in the creative sector but just keep on doing that research and looking into the different jobs and you will find something that's right for you. The answer is there are loads of jobs that you can do in the construction industry that are not based on site. You have many jobs such as being an architect that's designing the buildings and designing the project, you have planners, you have surveyors but what you can do is go onto the website and go to the careers explorer and there it will give you an option to type in your preferences and it will give you a whole list of jobs that you can apply for that are purely office-based in the construction industry. No you do not need a degree, helpful of course, but many of our big names in the industry don't have degrees or they have a degree in a different area other than fashion or they have come through the traditional degree route and there are different ways of getting into the sector and the one I would recommend the most would be coming through through an apprenticeship. The industry themselves have developed over 13 apprenticeships now to encourage you to look at this route and the reason for that is because they will give you the technical skills required to actually be able to do the job within a working environment. They will help you with the production type skills needed to do the manufacturing side of things and will be able to teach you the in-depth knowledge that you need to have which can give you such good grounding and foundation that you can't help but succeed in this industry. Thank you again everyone, we hope we've answered your questions and given you some useful links and places to find out even more and don't forget to look out for our next show. Bye!