Using MyWoW Ambassadors to support curriculum-wide career education

The My World of Work (MyWoW) Ambassador programme supports schools in developing and embedding the use of My World of Work throughout the school.

Ambassadors are recruited and trained using a suite of online tools. Denny High School run their Ambassador programme in support of broader career education activity which is aimed at embedding an understanding of career planning throughout the curriculum. This article shares the approach and impact of this initiative.

Denny High School

Denny High School have a well established MyWoW Ambassador programme. The school have utilised both a senior and BGE Ambassador set to have a progression of pupils over the years. The COVID-19 pandemic caused issues with this delivery model. As part of our recovery we have reinstated the senior MyWoW Ambassadors first, with the BGE Ambassadors to be brought back over the next year or so.

The Ambassadors have a variety of different roles within the school. These are continually growing and evolving in order to best support our staff to embed career education into their everyday teaching practice. The Ambassadors are well respected and consulted regularly over the course of the year, for practical advice on using MyWoW resources and through sharing MyWoW with our pupils, parents and wider community.

The school’s view:

The MyWoW Ambassador programme at Denny High School has three main objectives:

Support staff ‘Careers Champions’ to embed the career education into their everyday teaching practice.
Support pupils and parents with course choice by providing materials to encourage the use of MyWoW resources to offer reliable careers advice.
Develop different personal skills that will be useful in their own career paths.

Support ‘Career Champions’

The ‘Careers Champions’ are a staff group with representatives from each department within the school. Their focus is to build more natural links to careers and educational pathways within their subject areas with the view to improving pupil confidence in their awareness of post school options. The MyWoW Ambassadors have supported staff in creating small meaningful careers activities, in the form of starters or plenaries that the ‘Careers Champions’ then use with their classes. They work together and discuss different activities they enjoy doing in their own lessons and build both generic and subject specific resources for the Champions to use. Here are some of the examples of the resources that the pupils have produced this session >

I am really enjoying having conversations with classes about where chemistry and science can lead them. It is also good to see pupils’ perceptions on different careers, especially that not all jobs require a degree!

Miss Naismith

Probationer

It's amazing seeing pupils join the dots and connect my subject to their future careers and interests, they have become really interested in the different paths school and education can lead them onto.

Miss Reppe-Roverselli

English teacher

Support course choice

This aspect of the MyWoW Ambassador work is more behind the scenes. The Ambassadors helped build an interactive digital underground map that the school uses to help pupils consider their careers options based on the subjects they are considering. Each underground map is linked to the MyWoW website for pupils and their families to explore the resources together while they consider which courses to study at school. The Ambassadors benefitted from the research these underground maps required as the task required research on every job role we have included. This ensures we have a good spread of job roles that is representative of the job market.

In this session, the Ambassadors have taken a more public role with their course choices support. They have recorded voice over tracks for videos that our Technologies department have produced to help their pupils understand the differences between the subjects they offer in the senior phase. These videos have been highly commended and may form the basis of other department course choice help over the coming sessions.

Develop personal skills

Being part of this project is beneficial for the Ambassadors themselves - in addition to the help they offer other pupils, staff and the wider school. As such, we make sure that they have plenty of opportunity to build their personal skills.

Our main focus for this session has been on digital and communication skills. The Ambassadors were a fundamental part of the roll out of our iPad provision. They have run workshops, help desks and have provided support to staff and pupils alike. They were the first pupils to receive their iPads and they had additional training to help them enhance their personal digital skills.

They also support other school events such as careers days and visiting speakers in ways that allow them to build their leadership and communication skills further. This helps them to speak about themselves effectively in interviews and applications.

The pupil’s view of the skills they developed as an Ambassador and the best thing about being one: