Community Cabinet Outcomes

Here is an outcome that is measured, arguably not accurately, our regions youth unemployment rate is around 20%. What are the measurable outcomes of a 15-17 year old student spending about 2 hours of their class time once a year meeting and having one on one conversations with around 25 different business people? Will 70%, 50%, 32 % of those attending gain work experience? I don’t know the outcome but if we had more resources this and more could be measured. The point of these conversations between students and business is however for the student to practice/demonstrate their communication skills, develop a local business network, ask questions about career options, gain confidence and be better prepared for actual job interviews; if a student manages to gain work experience from their own initiative that’s a bonus. ‘Not good enough’. These 3 words pretty much summarised the response we received at the Community Cabinet meeting on Sunday about further developing C2C (Communication to Careers). When seeking clarification with the Director General (DG) of Education (someone had determined our original planned meeting with the Minister was now not the best use of her time) he was saying that developing connections between students and local business was not beneficial for the students, he didn’t agree but without providing what the measurable outcomes will be, there may be more important use of the students time. Plus if the public schools don’t support C2C by not sending their students and the private schools do, seek funding from them to further develop C2C. Wow with a measurable outcome of 20% youth unemployment I wasn’t expecting a concept that might make the pathway to youth gaining employment easier to be stonewalled. However the DG was in a hurry for another meeting and apologised for cutting ours short. Time it is such a limited resource, it’s amazing how local business people can take time out of their day to have conversations with students without knowing beforehand the measurable outcomes. Common sense suggests the more conversations business people have with youth the better their chances of gaining employment. Can you measure common sense though? Time ran out to ask the DG that.