Carolyn Maggs: Employability and Skills Officer, South Gloucestershire Council
How do you use Careerpilot?
Within the Council directly with care leaver’s team, virtual school staff and Families and Young People’s Service staff.
How does Careerpilot help young people make informed decisions?
As a free to access and easy to navigate platform Careerpilot is kept refreshed and up to date to provide the best information and advice possible to young people, their parents and carers and careers guidance and other staff.
What impact do you think it has on students?
It allows them to explore their options and career pathways on their own or with parents/carers and staff, both in school and through the Council services.
How does Careerpilot support your role?
It is useful tool when working with other teams within the Council. For instance it is now embedded as part of the Care Leavers Employment Strategy where our staff who work directly with care leavers can support them exploring their options. Following a short training session it now gives these members of staff confidence that, while they are not Careers guidance trained, they can support the young people with making decisions in a more informed way.
Our virtual school which in in place to support our young people in care, as corporate parent, is using Careerpilot. With the help of Careerpilot staff we will be delivering a workshop to Foster carers early in 2018 about Careerpilot and the Parentzone so that they feel more confident and able to support those young people in their care with decisions on education and career pathways.
How does Careerpilot contribute to partnership working?
Careerpilot has always worked with teachers, careers guidance staff, other projects (e.g. HEFCE funded NCOP’s) and local authority staff to develop a free, fit for purpose and impartial tool, which is currently sustainable. In a climate of reducing support and budgets over a number of years this has proved invaluable. Even with the recent launch of the new Careers Strategy and announcement of additional funding by Government for Career guidance in schools Careerpilot will still prove invaluable as funding will not need to be diverted to pay for other platforms.