Target Attends Interview Evening at Wales High School

On Thursday 27th February Target supported an Interview Evening Event at Wales High School Academy Trust. We were invited to talk to students about what it is like to work in Health and Social Care and the varied roles and work we complete at Target. The aim of our attendance was to inspire Y12 students to consider a career in health and social care.

Amanda Fields who represented Target at this event commented;

“I attended Wales Comprehensive School last night to meet with students currently studying their health and social care course. I talked with them again about the varied roles both in support and care. How their current interests could be utilised within our organisation – for example, one of the students is a keen mathematician and loves the idea of supporting people with a learning disability. Her nephews have ASD and she helps with childcare form time to time. I talked about how she could use her skills in maths to help people on service to develop their budgets, reviewing their income and what they needed to pay out to ensure nothing goes unpaid. Or….. She could consider supporting organisations to continue their frontline work by joining their finance teams. Another wanted to work with children, so I talked about the support that is required to the children of people who are residing in a refuge and how that’s really important to aid them to process some of the trauma they may have witnessed.”

There is a recognised need to bolster the workforce within Health and social care and the NHS. One part of doing this is through the ambassador network. This network of multi disciplinary NHS and health and social care professionals supports the locality to raise the profile of careers within the sector, championing the profession and supporting people to explore routes into working within it. We attend events such as the Interview Evening Event for Y12 at Wales High School to talk about the varied roles and opportunities and share our own experiences of our work to hopefully inspire others to join the sector.

We also support back to work schemes and Job Centers, attending to share details around our current vacancies, what a typical day for a worker could look like or can entail, take any questions and carry out interviews to see if we can offer them a position.

We complete workshops in Learning disability services and special education settings to help students to understand our roles and sometimes to help reduce their anxieties around having to attend hospitals or health care settings, talking to them about processes or procedures to make them less frightening.

We support careers days in school in year 8 before they start to choose their options. We give talks in colleges and all manner of other educational settings. We have even created short videos around ‘the day in the life of’ for students.