Creating Careers focuses on opening doors, working alongside people across Cumbria to help them discover their strengths, build confidence and take meaning steps into work. Discover how the team are making a real impact to the people and businesses they support. From the skills candidates gain to the employers who benefit from being a part of Creating Careers, and the wider impact the team is making on the community.
For a third consecutive year, People First invited guests from across Cumbria to celebrate the People First Awards.
Held at The Halston Hotel, Carlisle, it was truly a night to remember as learners from the People First Academy marked their achievements and richly deserved qualifications alongside corporate sponsors of the event, including the headline sponsor, Borderway Finance.
It was standing room only, as over 200 people in the room, from local businesses and local authorities to learners loved ones, the marking of incredible triumphs was felt by everyone. The event was a real celebration and collaboration with people committed, wanting to support more people with learning disabilities and Autism into paid work.
The evening also featured a talk from Jill Johnston from The Cumberland, who shared powerful insights on what it means to be an inclusive employer in action. Jill spoke on the importance of creating workplaces where everyone feels valued and able to contribute, and how inclusion must be embedded in our everyday culture, not just policy.
We also used it as an opportunity to launch our ’35 in 35’ campaign where we are asking 35 businesses to stand alongside us and support 35 people into work, to mark our 35th anniversary.
We created the People First Experience Day, an opportunity for people from local businesses to come and work alongside some of our fantastic learners who work at the People First Conference Centre.
Our first People First Experience day was attended by employees from Carlisle Brass. This local business has been working with us over the last year as partners in our Creating Careers programme. A year ago, they hired one of our Creating Careers Candidates providing them with an opportunity to work in their warehouse.
Carlisle Brass are passionate about providing the best environment for their employees and providing them with the support they need. Therefore, they were keen to learn more about supporting the neurodivergent members of their workforce so were excited to have some of their employees attend the first People First Experience Day.
The Carlisle Brass guests were provided with mentors for the day who were all senior learners from our Hospitality Academy. These mentors guided them through the tasks of the day which the learners do every day to ensure that the People First Conference Centre is a hospitable, clean and tidy space for the customers who use the space. After having lunch together our Carlisle Brass guests were provided with an opportunity to learn more about inclusive forms of communication.
Our guests from Carlisle Brass walked away inspired and shared;
“Everything we witnessed truly inspired us and gave us a valuable understanding of the potential that can be achieved through creating a safe, educational and emotionally adaptable environment. All in all, it was a truly great experience that we would love to expose more of our staff too.”
The Creating Careers hosted our most recent Development Day at Carlisle United, thanks to our friends at the Carlisle United Community Sports Trust.
The day was a great chance for us all to get together, off-site to check in with one another, see how we are all feeling before looking ahead to future plans. This agenda included training sessions on new ways of working, including adopting the new SEQF (Supported Employment Quality Framework), looking at how we gather evidence and share our stories in an impactful and meaningful way as well as effective employer engagement.
We ended our session by asking, ‘what makes a good job coach?’ This is a great reflective tool for us as a team and find it’s something that brings us all back together then and really focuses our attention. We ask this question on all of our induction/ development days and then look back on previous answers to see if anything has changed.
As our team is made up of Job Coaches who are out and about supporting candidate in workplaces, we rarely have the chance to all come together so days like this are vital for feeling included and connected. We host these Development Days alongside our regular weekly team meetings and find they are a great space to share information and support one another and as a team, we prioritise these opportunities to get together.
