Further steps in building your careers network

This is the third in a series of four articles on building successful careers networks. In the first article in this series we looked at the role of professional associations, in the second article in this series, we looked at the pre planning that is necessary before contacting employers, that is working out what you want from them and what is available locally to support your CEIAG learning outcomes.

This article continues with the process of onboarding, piloting your system whilst gathering feedback and lastly, for this post, building on the relationship you’ve started.

Preparing for the first time an employer comes to deliver a session.

In the last post, we looked at ensuring that your employers have enough information and a clear understanding of the school objectives for the session. In addition, you and the school staff that are involved in the session need to be clear about the employer objectives.

So it makes sense to make time (if possible) to meet with the employer before they set foot in school for the first time, just to check understanding. Think of it as a sort of plenary to check their grasp of the session and build rapport.

This can be in person, via Zoom/Teams/Google or even via phone, but I can’t stress enough that the goodwill and relationship that you will build by taking even 10 minutes to do this will save you so much time down the line.

So send a reminder of final logistics and the brief 7 days before event. It can be an email or a form but include a reminder of the date, time and location as well as other info such as the sign in process. Paid subscribers have access to a ready to edit word document that can be partly pre filled with standard items like directions, safeguarding info etc and thus save time, or of course you can devise one yourself. When you send this reminder offer them a ten minute call or video meeting to go over:-

1. Student cohort and objectives

2. Practical logistics

3. Expectations and safeguarding

4. Next steps

Whilst I understand that this seems a lot of faff, clear expectations and communication are shown to reduce no-shows and improve delivery quality. Just take a look at Facebook and LinkedIn forums for messages from careers leaders who have an engagement booked and employers have let them down at the last minute and are scrabbling around to find replacements. You don’t want to be that person! I’ve even heard and experienced employers forget and just not show up. This was the catalyst for my paying far more attention to building a rapport with my employers. It worked for me and it can work for you.

Preparing for second and later engagements

This is a little out of sequence but I just wanted to emphasise, you don’t need to do this amount of prep with every employer for every activity. The point of all this preparation is that you build relationships with your employers and thus, save time on finding and preparing new employers every single time you need an engagement. You may still wish to offer a pre engagement call but the likelihood of needing one is much reduced. Still send them a reminder of final logistics 7 days beforehand. You can of course offer them another call but they will hopefully be versed in your methods by now and not need one. You’ll be reaping the rewards of all the work you’ve done onboarding them already.

Don’t Run Before You Can Walk. Time to evaluate

If you’ve been following this series, you may well already have a number of employers with whom you’ve started to build a rapport. Ideally you should plan evaluation of activities before their engagements take place. You may have already had some engagements take place and you may or may not have evaluated these engagements.

If you have. Look at your evaluation method. Was it time efficient? Did it give you food for thought? If so, great, well done. Go with what works for you. However, if you’ve not gathered feedback or it was less than useful, lets look at ways to cut down on the time taken to evaluate WITHOUT losing feedback.

Remember when, earlier in the series I suggested you start small? Pick 3–5 employers covering different activities.

Collect feedback from students, teachers, and employers using short surveys. Many schools use online tools to gather and collate feedback electronically. Use these tools to save your time and sanity. What feedback you require will be dictated by your objectives, I suggest you keep to simple yes/no answers or graded responses such as a scale of 1-5, however, ensure one of your questions gives you some feedback to suggest how the event could have been improved. Remember, you can’t meet all the suggestions but one or two may be a recurring theme and be a pointer for you to tweak or change something.

Sample feedback questions

Employer:

· “How easy was organising this?” (1–5),

· “Would you like to do this again?” Yes/No.

· Suggest one way this activity could have been bettered for you?

Student:

· “Did this help your understanding of workplace skills?” Yes/No,

· Why or how did the activity help or not help your understanding of workplace skills?

· Suggest one way this activity could have been bettered for you?

Teacher:

· “Was this useful for learning objectives?” Yes/No.

· Did you learn anything new? If so what?

· Suggest one way this activity could have been bettered for you?

Take time to look over the responses and tweak the offer, this will be valuable feedback for you to present to Ofsted AND even more importantly, to prove the value of the work you are doing. You can also send it to the employer who may well find it useful for their reporting.

There will be more on evaluation in the next article.

Following up after an engagement.

It’s important to follow up in a timely manner. A standard text email within 24-48 hours will always be appreciated. Paid subscribers have access to a pre written email text which will save you time, especially for those drop down days where you have numerous employers in. It often pays to add a few personal words if you have time. Just adding BTW, “I just loved your shoes”, or “The pupils were talking about your demonstration” takes but a few seconds and again, builds rapport.

The last article in this series will cover keeping your network going and improving and evaluation.

Paid subscribers have access to both the fully editable Word document files mentioned in this article and the downloads from previous articles in this series.

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