“By Design” delivered Career’s Workshop

16 Jan “By Design” delivered Career’s Workshop

Since the first steam locomotive railway in 1804 the rail industry has come a long way and offers a myriad of career options. As part of our CEIAG (Careers, information, education, advice and guidance) “By Design” came into RSA Arrow Vale on Friday 5th January and delivered a trio of engaging workshops to attract bright new young talent to the expanding rail industry.

 The workshops were delivered in 3 separate 50 minute sessions in a rotation format. They included an introduction to the breadth of the industry and  some fun facts. It also included a segment called ‘Meet an Engineer’ where the students tried to answer some simple questions about the STEM Ambassador’s career, educational background and career progression. The students used Quizdom handsets to log their answers to those questions. After each question, we looked at the answer data to see which students had answered correctly and asked them why they had chosen that answer. They were then be provided with the correct and a more detailed answer.

The students also looked at innovation and the use of technology in rail. The students were given an information card about one particular area related to the wider rail industry and were challenged to design an app that could assist this area. Students came up with apps to order food on the train or at the point of booking and apps to stay safe on the platform late at night and in a train should you be a solo traveller. We even had an app that helped you build a train from scratch! We chatted about skills needed to work in the rail industry and how to get them.

Our favourite workshop was the teamwork robots based activity. After having immense fun with the robots we chatted about what skills we had used in that activity, how we could improve or better utilise ours skills to improve the outcome, which of those skills related to the rail industry how we could demonstrate these skills on a CV.

 Lots of students didn’t have train driver as a dream ambition but fashion designer and graphic designer as well as civil engineer sounded right up our street!

Miss S Noble