Skills Camps — Where Career Coaches Are Discovered

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Skills Camps are a new and unique approach to discovering unused human potential:

• Training career coaches to discover local unused transferrable skills
• Specifically designed courses for the hard to reach, long term unemployed/ people on benefits.
• 12—week long, 1/2 day per week of professional-grade life/career coaching to help people understand their personal offer in the world of work, while building up their confidence and communication skills.
• Brokering work placements, helping participants to gain work experience and testimonials

What makes these courses unique is that we not only enable participants to reach the job market, but also to gain skills as career coaches. During each course, they practice coaching on each other and on members from the local community. They can also stay on and develop their coaching skills further in the next Skills Camp, following the one they attended. This is true network-based peer to peer coaching, which creates a ripple effect throughout the community, as the benefits of the workshops are experienced beyond the actual course participants. Some Skills Camps participants, may go on to participate in Social Startup Labs, but attending a Skills Camp is not a pre-requisite to participating in a Social Startup Lab.

As part of our Startup Brixton Programme we ran four Skills Camps cohorts. The programme has now finished. The details below are for reference purposes only. Feel free to use any of this material if helpful.

The Results of the Startup Brixton Programme are here. [link coming soon]

Marketing and Outreach - how we made sure we were reaching our target audience.

We were very proud of our outreach, primarily because it worked! Our approach was to work with the target audience to design a flyer that would truly speak to them. We focused on sink estates. The flyer was designed to speak to the left and right brain of the target audience. Classes ran every Wednesday morning and afternoon in two parallel cohorts, so that we people who were long term unemployed would likely be able to attend. The program ran for three months at a community centre right in the middle of the area we were targeting.

How we marketed the programme - the flyer we used

 

How we marketed the programme — Organised Face to Face Drop-ins

We knew that people would not necessarily pick up the phone or email us on seeing the flyer. So we made ourselves available at places we knew they would already be familiar with. We gave them the opportunity to meet us and ask us questions. We found this human element vital as part of the process of ensuring people were aware of what the progamme was, and it also gave us the benefit of ensuring that we were reaching the right people. Knowing what kind of people would most benefit was very important. Our efforts payed off. See the outcomes here.

Undecided about applying to Skills Camps? Drop in during Info Week

Come and find out more in person! Hear more about it, ask all the questions that you like, find out if it is for you, and register your interest in person.

Just show up to our short open-door intro sessions from 30th April to 4th May 2012, at any of the local hotspots below. Come along, bring a friend, and maybe someone else who you think this would benefit!

Please note, we are an independent organisation, not affiliated to the council or the local Job Centres.

If you would like us to come and speak at a venue local to you, just contact us here. More locations are being confirmed daily so watch this space!

We had to often remind people that we are an independent organisation, not affiliated to the council or the local Job Centres.