29th February 9:30am -4:30pm Center Parcs
Student Conference 2016
With Vision West Nottinghamshire College – Ana Smith, Louise Knott, Sally Dodsley and Vandana Sharma
The student conference which was hosted this year at Center Parcs contained workshops on both EMPLOYABILITY, COMMUNICATION and CONFIDENCE.
To begin the day we discussed the current University Centre building project, students were advised to ask any questions that they may have, we also gave suggestions on how we want the building to work when it opens this September (2016) just in time for the new courses to start.
Next was a workshop on employability; Ana Smith talked over what employers look for from business and customer awareness to problem solving skills and communication and literacy skills. This workshop was a great eye opener not just for me but also for the other students on the conference who were all at different stages of study.
The confidence workshop focused on who we are as a person; what we offer to those around us to friends, family but most importantly what we offer our employers both present and future. We looked at personal branding and how we market ourselves to employers.
And finally the workshop on Communication which was by far the most involved and active of the sessions; we spoke about the fact that when communicating with people you must
- be clear and concise
- make sure that they can hear you
- enunciate and dictation
- check that information is correct when you receive it
- cut out the middle man to ensure the correct message is received (but only where possible)
We played a classic game of WHISPERS ! All fourteen students stood in a line and then passed a message along the line by only whispering it to each other with no repetition. As you can imagine it didn’t go quite to plan as what Ana had hoped. The message a the start was completely different to that at the end.
Ana then said that remember as a receiver of a piece of information you must respect the messenger, ask questions and paraphrase yourself to ensure your own understanding of the message.
At the end of the session we also carried out a task in which we were paired up and then sat back to back to each other. One person was given a picture and without showing it to the other person they had to describe it, but similarly to WHISPERS! only once. The drawing below shows my attempt (my drawing was the best interpretation of what my partner had described).
Overall the day was really good and gave me some excellent references for my reports (BONUS!)
Signing off
J
mylifeasjessthebeautytherapist 