The Nottingham Building Society: Career Academy

The Nottingham Building Society has launched its flagship employability programme, Career Academy, to support 16 to 18-year-olds as they build key life skills through meaningful interventions that will help to prepare them for the world of work.

Supported by community engagement specialists EVERFI, the brand-new resources further develop The Nottingham’s existing employability activity with the aim of helping young people fulfil their potential by igniting their future career ambitions.

With Career Academy, the Nottingham Building Society has developed a catalogue of online, downloadable resources for educators which follow the Gatsby benchmarks and are linked to the PSHE Association’s programme of study. They include a video shot entirely on location in Nottingham charting the journey from education to employment of 17-year-old Sabina, who wants to work in IT.

The full resource suite is now available for free to schools across England. The materials, which contain lessons aligned to the curriculum that teachers can choose from to suit student needs, are based on the following five areas:

1. Navigation: “I know how to find out about work”
2. Practice: “I can experience what being at work is like”
3. Skills: “I have the skills employers want”
4. Networking: “I can get ideas from different people”
5. Reflecting: “I understand why an employer might value me”

Teachers who took part in the Career Academy pilot have shared that: “Students learnt a lot about themselves in the content. It allowed them to think about how their own personality and skills align with different employers and what employability skills different industries are looking for.”

Another teacher praised the resources adding that: “The worksheets provided are an excellent resource to get students thinking about their futures and reflect on the industry which would best suit them,” with a further teacher highlighting that “where students had a career but no plan to it, they have now investigated a route and had the inspiration to research this further.”

Teachers can register to the Career Academy here for the chance to win an exclusive Q&A class session and discover the range of free curriculum-linked resources for their school: https://get.everfi.com/nottinghambuildingsociety/