Northern Gas Networks is currently developing a new Education and Skills strategy. We set out to understand why young people think this is important and work with the council to develop impactful, useful and creative ways we can deliver this as part of our education skills and careers support.
You told us that the key benefits to Young People of an education and skills strategy were around providing young people with insight into jobs and careers, to have an opportunity to learn about the different types of jobs in the energy sector and to understand and learn the skills needed in a work space and the importance of STEM skills to the energy sector.
Considering this feedback, we will build these objectives into our strategy and make sure our activity reflects these key points.
During discussions around why Northern Gas Networks should have an education strategy, it was clear this presented an opportunity for Norther Gas Networks to increase understanding of the energy industry with young people, to develop a future workforce and to support local young people to gain the right skills for future employment
We will make sure that this strategy clearly aligns with our social mobility pledge and that any educational work we undertake provides and opportunity to educate young people about future energy and future green jobs
Our council members told us our education and skills plan should focus on helping young people understand about jobs and skills and we should highlight clear pathways from education into the gas industry
A key objective when we are designing our education programme is now to provide young people with the skills to be help them be “job ready”.
It was clear from the conversations that there was a great deal of interest around apprenticeships, the schemes offered by Northern Gas and the opportunities to participate in higher level apprenticeships and graduate programmes.
Whilst we already have a good apprenticeship programme in place, it has focused so far on levels two and three. We will embarked upon an exercise to gather better understanding of how this programme can be expanded and offer higher levels of apprenticeships and what graduate placement programmes we can offer.
Having shared the type of activities we deliver with secondary schools, our council members said that it was important we use fun and interactive activities and workshops based on challenges working at Northern Gas– particularly focusing around Science, Engineering, Maths and Technology (STEM) skills.
We plan to increase our focus on delivering school sessions as challenge sessions where we run more workshop sessions with groups of pupils to solve problems. WE also intend to grow our ambassador programme and recruit more of our colleagues to be STEM ambassadors and work with secondary schools across our region.
Across all the different conversations we had it was clear that learning work-based skills and getting experience of a working environment was really important and seen as valuable by the council members. Our council said we should have 2 types of placement options; one to give a taster of roles across the business and another that offers specific role placements to develop experience for those who know what they want to do. Most importantly any work experience should give experience of a realistic working environment.
Supporting young people to develop work-based skills is really important to us, and we will ensure that this is a key objective in the new plan. We will prioritise offering post 16s experience to support A-Level and post school education decisions but will also offer placements from year 10 and work more closely with school careers teams.
We are designing a work placement programme that offers a range of experience and more specific placement programmes