Mentoring Circles

Responsive Training Services was approached by Allerdale & Copeland Job Centre Plus to be involved in a scheme that they wanted to run called “Mentoring Circles”. The idea of this course was to help young unemployed people gain some skills that could help them into potential employment.

Our Operations Director Mathew was given free rein with the contents of the sessions. The sessions were two hours long weekly for a 3- week period.

Session 1 – Introduction and team bonding/aspiration and mentoring advise – this involved a lot of ice breakers and trying to get everybody comfortable with each other. After all these people had never met each other before! We done some team bonding activities and followed on to what people’s goals and aspirations were. We then asked the candidates what is was they wanted to get out of the next few sessions and that is what we based the two next sessions on.

Session 2 – Interview and application skills – it came to light that a lot of the candidates weren’t comfortable with interviews at all and didn’t really know the best ways to act during them. So, we helped by giving some employer advice as well as doing some role play.

Session 3 – Employability skills – We wanted the candidates to be able to identify and understand employability skills.

The feedback we gained from this session was incredible and we were so happy to hear that 2 of the candidates gained jobs and 4 have interviews in near future. 6/7 isn’t too bad!

We had a review session with the JCP and came up with some constructive feedback and reflected on the sessions. For a article about the mentoring circles follow the link below.

We hope to run more of these sessions and they are rolled out across the country.