Pinestar Ltd delivers Fairness & Development Workshop to students

West Cheshire & North Wales Young Chamber Sponsor, Pinestar Ltd, recently delivered a workshop to students at Chester International School during their latest ‘Theme Launch Days’.

These days involve the school’s students being taken off the regular timetable to take part in a carousel of skills-building activities that are focused on a specific global context. The theme for this day was ‘Fairness and Development’.

Director of Pinestar Ltd, Ian Wainwright, hosted an insightful workshop focused around this theme for seven different groups of students, ranging from Year 10’s to Year 13’s. Ian started each session by giving the students a warm-up activity where they had to match a list of famous celebrities to their first-ever job, this allowed the students to see how much development is possible from a first job.

Ian then gave the students a table which included some of the different types of job opportunities that were available to them when leaving education, these included: apprenticeships (large & small organisations), company-sponsored degrees, small business trainees and becoming self-employed. The students were split into groups and told to select one of the job opportunities and to note the positives and negatives of example jobs in that sector before feeding back their conclusions to Ian and the rest of the class.

Ian commented after the event: “This event was really well-run. All of the students engaged in my session and they provided a lot of excellent contributions and insight. I thoroughly enjoyed working with them as they started to consider what they may do, once they leave school.”

Young Chamber

The aim of the session was to build awareness of the steps that pupils will need to go through when applying for jobs. Niamh spent time speaking about CVs, helping the pupils think about what skills are required and need to be noted in order to meet the job description.

Niamh commented: “Trying to get to grips with the ‘world of work’ can be a very daunting prospect for young people postCovid. They haven’t had the opportunity to get the work experience that their older counterparts had and so missed out on obtaining some crucial life skills.

“It’s important that employers not only understand that, but that they ensure they do everything they can to help young people to prepare for life after education. We see this as a crucial part of HR and we’re delighted to be able to support the Young Chamber initiative through our interview preparation workshops and mock interview participation.

n Ian Wainwright discussing the task with the Chester International School students.

Welcome to our new Young Chamber Sponsors

Get involved with Young Chamber...

Young Chamber was established to tackle the skills gap that businesses were reporting and to help pupils, at schools and colleges from across the region, develop the necessary skills to hit the ground running when they leave education.

It does this through the running of events at schools and colleges that are part of the programme. These include career talks, interview days and workshops, all designed to give students an insight into the world of work and to help them as they start their careers.

The programme however would not be possible without the help of its sponsors! In the 2022-23 academic year the support of Young Chamber sponsors was fantastic as 38 businesses and over 110 employees gave up a total of 170 business hours to help tackle the local skills gap, and this year, we hope that the programme can support even more students at schools & colleges across West Cheshire & North Wales.

If you are not a sponsor of the programme but you want to help the programme to continue to support students across our region, please email youngchamber@wcnwchamber.org.uk for more information.

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