www.mytalentplace.co.uk, the London based online careers specialists for students have recently launched a range of ready to use careers lessons for teachers in secondary schools throughout the UK. These lessons have been designed by industry experts and cover a broad number of topics that students need to have knowledge on in order to improve their employability as well as their skills in interviews and the workplace.
Offered on an annual subscription basis, the service – Careers Advisor Plus means that there is far less pressure on Careers and PSHE teachers to struggle to keep up to date with changes in the world of work. Access to the service gives teachers the most current information on careers as the lessons are updated regularly during the year. MyTalentPlace founder, Dr. Grant Crow says that “it’s really difficult for teachers to provide relevant and current advice to their students on the world of work, as this world is changing at such a rapid pace. In fact, it’s unfair to even expect this. Teachers need to be equipped with the necessary tools to make sure they can provide good quality advice. Careers Advisor Plus is the leading tool available in this area”.
Each lesson comes with a facilitator’s guide as well as all the needed handouts for the exercises and every lesson typically contains 2 exercises, many of them group activities, so that the students are best able to develop the required skills.
The ready to use lessons are available in 3 categories, enabling teachers to choose to subscribe to lessons within categories as well as the entire portfolio if needed. Categories available are:
- Initial preparation for employment. The careers lessons in this category focus on helping students to prepare for and perform in interviews.
- Developing Skills for Enterprise and Employability. These lessons are a response to frequent criticism from UK businesses that graduates and school leavers lack the basic soft skills required to be effective in the working environment
- Personal effectiveness. These lessons help students to develop their own sense of direction, clear goals as well as the realisation that talent is a combination of factors and that conventional intelligence is only a part of this.
Initial feedback from pilot schools has been extremely positive, with both students and teachers commenting on the quality of the resources as well as the fact that the lessons are engaging. Dr. Crow says “we’ve looked carefully at ways of making the careers lessons as interesting as possible to the age range we work with and have achieved that by using rich media, relevant music and images as well as keeping the lessons as short as possible while achieving the learning objectives”.
