Students bitten by Apple bug

Posting by Ranjit Hayer, Career Academy Manager and Business teacher

           

The Apple store in Touchwood played host to me and the second year Business Career Academy students last week and what fun we had when we visited.

The students, all in their second year of the BTEC Business qualification, were on their first fieldtrip since their return to College from their summer internships.

The fieldtrip was hosted by Shiva Patel, who spent the afternoon with us and showed off Apple’s fantastic gadgets. This included the Mac Book Pro and Shiva demonstrated how the students could use it to enhance their BTEC coursework using the ‘Pages’ software. The students used their current coursework assignments for the Market Research unit to design posters that they would then use as part of the market research for their Business Plan unit.

The students experimented with the fast and efficient way the Apple software worked and even had one-to-one support on how their assignments could be improved with a touch of Apple sparkle. At the end of the fieldtrip the students were given a copy of all their posters to take away with them to print off in College

Apple also gave the students their very own Apple t-shirts, which they wore with pride.

It is visits such as these that form part of the Career Academy experience. The College is working with Career Academies UK to implement this national scheme which raises the aspirations and employability of young people by offering not only visits, but also guru lectures, mentoring and paid internships. The students on this recent visit all recently completed six-week paid internships at local businesses.

These recent internships saw the students at a range of local businesses, from hotels to building societies, and solicitors to council offices.

For student Sam Wallace, it was Coventry Building Society who offered him an internship. He spent six weeks at the firm and his duties included serving on the counter, processing customer transactions, answering queries and arranging meetings with the advisors. He also took part in a community event in Chelmsley Wood and partially completed his Customer Service Assistant Taskbook, as well as working in the firm’s banking hall as a meet and greeter.

Meanwhile, the Village Hotel offered fellow student Nadia Begum a similar internship. During her six weeks with the firm, the former Langley School student worked in all departments of the hotel.

Chartered Accountants Grant Thornton were also part of the scheme. They offered an internship to Rittika Sharma, who spent time working in the firm’s audit department. This time was split between external audit and government audit and involved checking the clients financial records to source invoices and preparing the income and expenditure statement for the service charge. She also worked on an NHS corporate governance project.

Another accountancy firm, BDO, offered an internship to Ryan Fryer. He worked in the Market, Sales and Clients Department, carrying out data management and cleansing tasks, as well as supporting marketing events. He also performed a number of research tasks, involving researching companies and industries.

Away from accountancy, another student worked with Chiltern Railways. Munib Altaf was employed setting up an inventory programme for the small on-board shops that Chiltern run from Birmingham to London. Whilst he enjoyed the job it took a while to get used to getting up at 5.00am to get the train to London. His internship was also extended by a few days, so he could train other members of the team on how to use the inventory programme he’d been refining.

                                        

Meanwhile, five students went to Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council. Dipesh Sharma, Dipesh Chauhan, Siobhan Williams, Primal Chhaya, Fatima Az-Zahra took on a variety of roles in several different departments at the Council.

I’m really proud of the students for the work they did over the summer. They are now into the second year of the Business Career Academy and I can see how much they have developed in confidence and experience over the first year, which is great to see.