Careers Choices and Employers – A practical guide

We [The Careers & Enterprise Company] have partnered with the CBI to undertake research to better understand how employers engage with schools. From this research we have produced this practical guide for employers who want to engage with schools together with a compendium of case studies from businesses.

The guide is broken down into four key areas focusing on:

• Why employers should engage with schools
• Who should be engaged in the process
• What activities to undertake
• How to be effective

The research shows that engagement not only allows employers to add value to schools and the lives of young people, but that young people and schools in turn give huge value to employers. In addition to the hard business case for engaging with schools, employers told us that volunteering their time to help young people brings their employees joy, increases brand loyalty and importantly helps young people to consider certain career paths and industries for the first time.

It’s not just work experience – employer engagement takes many forms.

From providing strategic advice to the headteacher and senior leadership team to mentoring pupils or running enterprise compe ons, school engagement takes many forms. Every school is di erent so work in partnership with teaching sta to nd out what your school needs. The CEC can help by providing insight on which encounters are best evidenced and can have the most impact.

Prepare and debrief.

School engagement is a real posi ve for companies, but can be challenging. Make sure employees get the training, resources and support they need when they start working with schools. Encourage employees across your business to collaborate and learn from each other’s experiences. Engagement with schools sparks great ideas to bring back into the work environment, so ensure there are opportuni es to capture these.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at How to Support Careers and Enterprise Activities in Schools: a Practical Guide for Employers | The Careers & Enterprise Company