Graeme Woodhouse has been a Compliance Monitoring Consultant at Santander UK PLC since 2018.  Recently he and Santander colleague Libby Hallows took part in Career WorkOut at Sir Herbert Leon Academy.

“These sessions are great fun and engaging,” said Graeme, “also important.”

“Young people are often unaware of the variety of jobs that are available in an organisation. They often think that banking solely relates to branch type roles, whereas there are a whole variety of jobs out there.

“I have previously completed Career WorkOut sessions and I have found the attendees are interested in understanding how I have ended up in the job I am doing, what skills and qualifications are needed. More importantly, what it’s actually like working life is really like.

Career WorkOut involves volunteers sitting with 3-4 students at a time and allowing them to ask me questions about my career path and job.

“I was able to pass on any tricky questions,” said Graeme.  “The students spent about 6 minutes with me before moving on to another volunteer.

“I think these sessions are invaluable for the students to get to speak to complete strangers about the career options available to them.  This can help build their confidence. It gives me an appreciation of how tough it is for them to understand the options available to them when they are looking for careers. Overall the feedback from students is that they found the sessions usefu

Libby Hallows has been Agile Coach at Santander for 18 months.

“I decided to volunteer for the Career WorkOut because I’m passionate about social mobility,” she said, “and helping kids be aware of what options are available to them that they might not have seen.

“I was really impressed by the young people that I talked to. I hope they had their horizons widened a little bit by talking to the variety of adults who attended the session.

“Social mobility should be really important to any organisation. The more diverse an organisation becomes in terms of its make up, the better it tends to be in its understanding of market needs, and thus the more money it makes. So even from a bottom line perspective we should all be passionate about social mobility, without the fact that it means that on an individual level you may get to make a difference in someone’s life.”

If you would like to volunteer for a one-hour Career WorkOut in a local school, simply choose a convenient school and date from the list at www.worktree2.prominenthosting.com/events.