Career Academy visit HMRC

Posting by Ranjit Hayer, Career Academy Co-ordinator and Business teacher

The business experiences for the Career Academy students have been coming thick and fast in recent weeks and just before we broke up for Easter, we squeezed in a quick visit to Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) offices.

These visits are part of the Career Academy scheme at the College, which sees ten lucky BTEC Diploma Business students benefitting from opportunities with local firms. As well as visits, there are guru lectures, mentoring and internships that form part of the scheme.

                                                           

During this visit to HMRC, the students learnt about the “lean management” system, which has been widely used in manufacturing industry because of the high cost of machinery used in making goods. HMRC have introduced this system to their call centre environment, to help ease the flow of calls made, including enquiries about tax codes, from initial query to closing the query. This involves breaking each query down, looking at the paper work and the number of people involved with it and then finding a more efficient way of dealing with it and ensuring customers that make the query receive fast service.

That sounds quite complex, but Christine Holmes, who works for HMRC and also sits on the College’s Local Advisory Board for the Career Academy and is a “Partner in Business” to these students, demonstrated the use of the lean system, by setting up a Stickle brick activity. This activity spanned five rounds, in which the students learnt how over time businesses develop simple systems and forget there is a pressure to keep things moving quickly and change those systems that are ineffective. The students played the game and saw how the use of quality in the delivery of any product/service is integral part of business world today.

The students also got the chance to question a panel of HMRC experts, who explained why they work for HMRC, how they manage the lean system in their roles and the importance of always thinking of how to make the job more efficient.

They were also taken on an office tour, where the students saw the system in operation in the number of complaints the department receives, and how each call is monitored (hourly, daily and weekly).

It was a non-stop day, but was thoroughly enjoyed by the students. We thank Christine Holmes and the rest of the staff at HMRC for giving up their time to help the students.

There are more photos at www.facebook.com/solihullsixthform