Here I am, talking all things Skills Street with delegates at a Social Value event.

From a Children’s Capital of Culture Trainee …

When people ask me what I do for my job, I never really know how to answer it. The truth is, I do so much at Skills Street and feel like any answer I give will never fully express the full extent and depth of the different things I get up to at Skills Street without it turning into a ten-minute speech. The focus areas of my traineeship are Social Value and Governance and Policy, which essentially means writing all the small print on how Skills Street creates and measures its positive impact on the community, and ensuring that we have the legal (but very important) frameworks behind all our activity. At the same time, I've launched an updated version of our website; codesigned a creative and cultural zone; met with artists, businesses and community groups; written funding bids, made a presentation at a business breakfast event; and delivered trial activities at a number of schools. So, I guess I could equally call myself a business developer, web designer, project manager, bid writer, presenter and edutainer.

Skills Street was made to challenge the ‘tick box’-y approach to learning and recruitment - it refuses to align to a single definition, and encourages us to redefine careers education; dissolving the boundaries between industry and curriculum learning. Skills Street is a visitor attraction, work experience and education centre all at once, made by and for businesses, educators and our community. In turn, working at Skills Street is just as undefinable and all encompassing.

So, what does a week in the life at Skills Street actually look like?

For me, it began with a rainy and early 7:30 start last Wednesday at the beautiful Wentworth Woodhouse, meeting new and familiar faces from a variety of local organisations, before attending an inspirational presentation all about the power of collaboration in business to create meaningful social value.

It was back into our office at Gulliver's Valley on Thursday, where I spent the morning reaching out to all the new organisations I met on Wednesday with collaborative opportunities. I then caught up with the rest of the Skills Street team, finalising our plans for Get Up To Speed with Stem at Magna – expect a careers carousel with entrepreneurs, creatives, and industry professionals, practical workshops on construction in the curriculum, wind-powered cars, and aerodynamics from our partners Esh, E.ON, and Vulcan to the Sky, and a Skills treasure-hunt task at our stand. It was more meetings for the rest of the day - a webinar on and finally discussing collaborative opportunities with the amazing Project Search team (who do some incredible work in providing internships and work experience to talented young adults facing barriers to learning and neurodivergence).

On Friday it was a working from home day - catching up on emails, and finishing some important policies including health and safety, DBS and Safeguarding, ready to upload onto our website, and more importantly ensuring everyone’s safety and wellbeing for school visits starting very soon! I think Fridays always need a bit of fun time to be creative, so I finished the day talking with artists and creative groups to map some design ideas for the creative and cultural zone.

As you can probably tell from above, no day at Skills Street is the same. And, as someone who thrives under constant variety and a little bit of chaos, it is the perfect job for me - one that is certainly NEVER boring.

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A week in the life of Skills Street

A skills solution that sticks?