About our context

Our project was developed during the spring and summer of 2020 during a time of unprecedented change for all in education and beyond. Our focus is on future career opportunities for young people in Sheffield and was lead by a multi disciplinary Sheffield Hallam University team supported by a regional steering group and local employability experts. Working collectively as a curriculum development team, we developed a package of materials to help young people between the ages of 12 and 15 think about the the key employability skills and motivations involved in certain careers pathways.

About our Resource

There will be careers for people beyond the pandemic and we want to share the key skills that people working in these sectors value. To do this we teamed up with the Skills Builder partnership to use their framework and language of employability skills. We then identified four employability sectors crucial to our Sheffield region during the Covid 19 pandemic. Within each of these sectors we asked people to share with us both the key employability skills that were important to them and also the motivational reasons that they chose such a career in the first place. We collated more than 100 local responses from people working in health care, social care, food chain from field to plate and digital media employment sectors – all important sectors in our region. In addition, the curriculum development team behind our resource creation have a strong track record of developing quality materials for the school curriculum including the international award winning materials of the ENGAGE European Framework 7 project. 

About our Approach 

Our materials act as tools to stimulate meaningful focused discussion between the people using them, either a student and their parent or a student and a careers team member.

Teaching using group discussion techniques enables students to develop skills to reason, discuss, argue and explain in context. Evidence suggests that giving opportunity for discussion through use of  scenarios and contexts enables individuals to work better cooperatively. (Meleady et al 2013).

Importantly our materials are also designed to be fun and accessible to use.

Reference

Meleady, H. (2013). Simulating social dilemmas: promoting cooperative behavior through imagined group discussion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(5), 839–853. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0031233