When you leave school, it can be difficult to know how to approach applications and interviews. You want to make sure that you are advertising how great you are and the skills and experience you have to offer, but how can you best prepare yourself?
Some of our top tips include ensuring you are concise when responding to questions, proofreading all applications, creating a skills log to refer back to, and utilising approaches such as the STAR technique. All of these ideas and more are covered in our ‘Create a FutureMe’ outreach workshop.
Members of the FutureMe team have recently delivered this session in three local schools. Hurworth School, George Stephenson High School and Mortimer Community College all invited FutureMe in to school to work with Year 11 students on creating and advertising their FutureMe!
The session begins with a ‘sell your product’ task, which requires students to create a sales pitch for a very unusual product. This task aims to help students realise that if they can think of positive features and uses of a ‘ghost in a jar’ or a ‘colour changing jumper’, then they can also promote their own attributes and skills. The students produced some amazing pieces of work!
Students were also asked to compile a list of skills and attributes of a person they consider to be successful. Of course success looks different to everyone; some students chose to write about parents, teachers and friends, whereas others chose to write about famous sports personalities and well-known business owners or entrepreneurs.
To end the session, students were asked to list their own skills, personality traits and experiences, which they could then take away with them and develop into a skills log to utilise in the future. Once students had discussed, they all had a go at utilising the STAR technique.
STAR stands for: Situation, Task, Action and Response. This is a commonly used technique to ensure that job applications and responses to interview questions are clearly, concisely and fully communicated. The students shared some great examples from their work experience, part-time jobs and extra-curricular clubs.
Our staff were amazed by all of the great ideas that students had to offer and hope that the young people left their sessions feeling ready to create and advertise their FutureMe!
