July 2022 | Issue No. 12
OPG NEWS The Opportunity Group monthly newsletter
What's inside this issue: Podcast Team updates Team news Birthdays!
OPG Podcast Can you believe the podcast has been live for 2 months now? We are now up to episode 16 of the podcast – this month Kate and Michaela have been discussing some of their favourite programmes – Process leader, Intelligence analysts and Digital community manager. Why not catch up with the latest episodes here: OPG Podcast
Celebrations! This month brings exciting news, JD Sports will be joining our Client List, with a real focus on Intelligence Analyst, to embed new skills within their security workforce. . . keep an eye out for more details . . . coming soon!
July saw some sunny days, especially for our first ever OPG summer event and some tough days but as a team, we are all pulling together to bring the sunshine back and create #oneteam in all that we do! Read on to find out what everyone has been up to this month!
“Data really powers everything that we do.” — Jeff Weiner.
Performance Team Ben and Candy are our Performance team moving forward. The guys are making sure our reports are ready for clients. They are focused on resolving system and data blockers, working closely with all teams. Webinars and sessions with Aptem are a key feature for the team, learning the functionality of Aptem to make sure we can teach all the team so we can all have a consistent approach!
Time has also been spent updating Learners' Progress on Aptem so they are all correct. Don’t forget if you have a data or Aptem request please email data@theopportunity.global - one of the team will investigate it for you.
“Those who plan do better than those who do not plan, even though they rarely stick to their plan.” — Winston Churchill.
Projects Michelle and Kat attended their Coaching and Feedback course with Neil and thoroughly enjoyed it – look forward to seeing those skills in action soon ladies! The focus for projects has been on Aptem, making sure everyone knows what role they play and that we have a seamless process to follow using the system. Michelle has worked extremely hard in making sure learner's line managers have been updated and helping with the audit, including cleaning up the folders on SharePoint and checking data. The projects team are all meeting face to face in Solihull on August 10th - Kat finally gets to meet her team!
Delivery Team
It’s been a productive month in July for the Delivery Team. Firstly, we would like to thank the entire team for pulling together, refocusing and having a voice, with escalating concerns and putting ideas forward to help with the overall business improvement plan. Thanks to Jo and Amanda too for your flexibility and focus this month in setting up the changes to the delivery team and making sure everyone is on track for success. Amanda will now be focusing on the Delivery Team, managing the coaching community and picking up on Quality, coordinating the business requirements. Jo now has a stronger focus on curriculum, delivery documents and taking ownership of the Facilitator community.
"Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success." – Henry Ford
Delivery Team
Rita will now have a more focused role, with a small cohort of learners to coach, supporting the EPA process and looking at IQA requirements for EPA portfolios and submissions. All learners now have clear and dated EPA action plans with a real focus on having the Past Planned End Date Learners go through to Gateway, this is a high focus for the delivery team. The Team is focused and moving forward together, and everyone is looking forward to getting together for the Standardisation meeting on the 17th August at the Crown Plaza in Solihull. this is a brilliant opportunity for us all to get together face to face and share the brilliant ideas and experience of the delivery team.
Outreach Opportunities Sally has successfully submitted a bid to Kings Lynn local authority for the Retrain Town Deal Funding. The contract will run from August 2022 until April 2024. The project will be a collaboration to support young people to gain new skills, increase their employability skills and engage with employmentinspired activities. Sally has also applied for the same funding and programme with Torbay Council.
Bids are being worked on for: Suffolk County Council Multiply, delivering maths functional skills to 19+ young people nationwide. This is a national government, funded an opportunity with a national value of 549 million to run from November 2022 until July 2025, Suffolk has been awarded £3752,491,92 over 3 years. We are bidding for employability wraparound support. Derbyshire County Council Mental Health is a commercial programme to provide training, development, and guidance for the Management Team within the council. To have a greater awareness of mental health the impact it has on their employees and how they can more effectively support them. Norwich Prison is very keen to work with us also.
Functional Skills "Continue to study and learn new skills." – Edie McClurg
Tracy, Sonia and Francessca have been completing a complete data cleanse – checking each learner file for existing, and any missing evidence; updating and contacting any learner necessary to start, or re-engage within their functional skills journey with us. From this, there may be some learner queries – direct them to us and we will sort this, email us at functionalskills@theopportunity.global July saw us relaunch Cognassist to ensure we are maximising this great learner support system. Each learner should now have completed their assessment or at least had the log-in details for this. We are working through the list so if there are any queries please bear in mind how many we will be supporting, and again if needed contact us at functionalskills@theopportunity.global
Our team are updating and renewing personal qualifications to share knowledge and skills with both staff and learners to continue with the exemplary style our learners are becoming accustomed to. Learner feedback for Sonia continues to be amazing, as does all staff feedback for Francesca. Well done!
“Every great design begins with an even better story.” — Lorinda Mamo.
Digital Design This month has been a whirlwind for the team. We are now the “Fab Four” and have pulled together to continue our rock star team status! Jake and Emily are busy working through client decks and task sheets as well as making sure our Content Library has all content available ready to be OPG branded (hopefully on a new OPG branded deck – watch this space!) They have also been supporting some of our Ofsted actions – Jake has been creating some off-the-job hours content to use in our programme overviews and we will also be working on some British values, Safeguarding and Hot topics content too. Jake has been working hard utilising some of the coaching skills he has learnt from the workshops Neil ran – it's good to see him utilising his skills to the max! Emily has been preparing the Skills Academy branding and has created a beautiful Logo to add to all our collateral.
Digital Design
Shannice is getting ready to move us into the world of Instagram to promote our podcast. To keep up to date with what Shannice is posting follow our page on LinkedIn here: OPG on LinkedIn. She has also been taking over the website and looking at how we can link it to our socials more – check out our website here: The Opportunity Group.
Knowledge shares are big for us, we want to be a multi-skilled team, feel free to check out our page Digital team Knowledge share to see what we are sharing - here.
Gemma has been busy working through eLearning content, supporting with Ofsted actions which include creating a topics sheet for Slack and also a set of British Values question modules to support our learner's understanding of the topic and working with Projects on our Skills Academy programme! Lots of exciting new design work coming into the team!
Social Team
It was fantastic to see so many of our team at our OPG Summer event! The sun shone on us all at the Heart of England centre and what a fun day it was! We enjoyed a train ride, a bouncy castle, a bouncy helter-skelter, a BBQ, some garden games and some of us got wet on Pedalos! It was nice to have everyone and their families together for the first time! Hope you all enjoyed it! We also raised £50 for the Dogs trust with our Bake sale – so thank you to everyone who contributed a cake and to everyone who bought a slice! Don’t forget we all have access to Flexiperks on our Perkbox site – this is a new way of getting treats or you can browse all the perks on offer here Perks
Social Team
You can also make sure of the Wellness hub - Wellness Hub which is updated monthly with new music playlists, sleep stories, workouts and webinars to help with your mental and physical wellbeing. And you can also utilise the celebration hub and give a member of the team a shout-out! Look out for our OPG Spotify playlist that we will be sharing to keep you motivated while you work, we are also going to be sending out invites for the next quiz and also a note about our Bake-off sweepstake! If you have any ideas for activities, you would like to see us organise please get in touch with a member of the Social team.
"Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life." – Amy Poehler
GOOD NEWS This months good news stories!
This month saw two of our own OPG guys graduating – Emily from the Digital Design team graduated in BA Graphic Arts from Uni of Southampton and Vern from the Delivery team graduated with a Master of Arts in History of Britain and the First World War from the University of Wolverhampton. Amanda has successfully completed her counselling Skills L2 Qualification and is starting her L3 in October which is great news! Lin is getting ready for retirement (in many many years to come!) and has started to learn Spanish – she is a week into her course via the Duolingo app! Bien Hecho Lin!
J a k e h a s a n e w a d d i t i o n t o th e f a m i l y i n t h e f u r r y s h a p e o f M o n ty the puppy! He is a bouncy ball of fluff (a little like Jake himself) and is settling in well! Jake has also successfully passed his online Graphic Design course – so look out for his amazing skills being showcased in some of our designs – well done Jake!
This month Shannice was entered into the Multicultural Apprentice awards, and we found out last week she has been shortlisted in the category of “Creative, Media and Marketing” – looking forward to seeing her hopefully win in November!
Gemma has won “Perkbox Admin Hero of the month” this month and was lucky enough to be sent a goodie box for her efforts – she is also being interviewed for them to use what we h a v e s h a r e d a s a c a s e s t u d y – th e y l i k e h o w w e u s e t h e c e l e b r a ti o n h u b and Feedback Friday! T h e y a r e a l s o m a k i n g a c h a r i ty d o n a t i o n o f £ 5 0 o n o u r b e h a l f to Andy's Mans Club which Michaela has v e r y k i n d l y s a i d s h e w i l l m a tc h !
Rita gifted this cute little kitten named Nova to her nephew to cheer him up – what a lovely gesture!
Lin - 15th August!
Mark S - 22nd August!