Are you looking for support for employment? Do you want more hours? Are you looking to gain a promotion or trying to follow a new career path? Have you been made redundant or furloughed? Do you want to upskill yourself by learning a new skill, trade through one of our courses here at Walsall College?
Kate, Alison and Natalie are your project mentors here from the ‘Connecting Communities’ team at Walsall College. They are here to help provide employability support to the people from ‘Birchills, Leamore and Beechdale’ to become employed, boost self-esteem and access free courses or training. And due to the current world climate and pandemic, the project and support services can now be accessed by wider areas within Walsall.
The Connecting Communities team can support Employment, further education and apprenticeships (through courses such as ‘CSCS, Retail and Health and Social Care’), Interview practice, 1:1, mentoring and support, Building confidence, Improving your CV, In-job support. As stated the support provided for the service users of the ‘connecting communities’ projects can be done on a 1 to 1 basis or within group-based settings, these are done through our job clubs created, managed and coordinated by the project mentors (Kate, Alison and Natalie). For example, prior to the current world pandemic, we supported people at the Beechdale Lifelong Centre, Green Lane Baptist Church, Watmos Community Association, Birchills Sure Start Centre and the Ryecroft community hub.
Looking for some inspiration – Lisa’s Case Study
The services provided by the project mentors within ‘Connecting Communities’ at Walsall College have managed to provide a life-long lasting effect on their service users.
For example, a number of clients enrolled onto the final ‘health and social’ course near the end of this academic year prior to the coronavirus. The aforementioned clients who enrolled on the course already held knowledge of the health and social care sector and had a variety of personal experiences, but held no academic knowledge in terms of the subject or sector or held any professional working experiences. During the course we could see in particular one client ‘Lisa’ had a real passion, enthusiasm, drive and ambition to work within the care industry and transfer her academic knowledge learnt and personal experiences into professional work experiences.
Therefore, through regular meetings with a project mentor, Lisa’s aims and goals were discussed and examined as to how they can be reached effectively and successfully. This led to the project mentors seeking out working opportunities for Lisa at every possible avenue within the care industry and motivating Lisa to do the same. The job searching conducted brought some great success initially with Lisa being offered a role within the care sector and within a few weeks she had started her training, however, due to the coronavirus, her job role came under some threat and therefore she failed to begin working there officially.
This led to a drop in confidence from the service user, however, project mentor continued to support Lisa in her on-going job search and help her through regular discussions over the phone in recent weeks led to Lisa finding a number of care roles that took her interest. Lisa began to apply for job roles within the care sector which led to her being offered a fantastic job role and she has gone on to complete her training helping her to become a ‘key worker’ within one of the hardest times within current times.
Want to find out more about the ‘Connecting Communities’ project?
Contact your local ‘Project Mentors’ Kate (07766 008318), Alison (07909 116651) or Natalie (07825 912559) or email through to your project mentors at Connectingcommunitiesteam@walsallcollege.ac.uk. Book a time to talk to us remotely during the lock-down.
For more information or to express your interest, visit the Walsall College website: https://www.walsallcollege.ac.uk/modes-of-study/courses-for-19-plus/connecting-communities/
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