It has been a great pleasure of ours to host quite a few Insight days since we started working with the Swindon and Wiltshire Growth Hub.

This wonderful organisation’s sole purpose is to help businesses thrive, and their dedicated team has offered us a wealth of resources and support since we joined. As well as fantastic networking events and training programmes, they put us in touch with some local schools who were looking to offer their students Insight days.

Insight days (and Challenge days) aim to provide work experience for students in a unique and impactful way. Instead of hosting one student for a week, they ask businesses to welcome a group of students for a single day, offering them a glimpse into the professional world and our industry.

This initiative started in our region last year by the Growth Hub and it’s been so successful, it’s been rolled out nationwide.

We recently hosted a local school of SEND children and gave them the opportunity to carry out a stock control task, and to race our remote-controlled forklift toys around a track.  They also all had the opportunity to operate the real thing and absolutely loved the experience.  The headteacher said the following:

”An amazing inclusive experience that our students haven’t stopped talking about! One student hasn’t even taken his hi viz off through the heatwave as he is so proud! A day that opened our eyes to what our students can achieve and aspire to; we were so proud of their listening skills, courage and confidence and cannot thank Key Performance Training enough for making us so welcome and for being so flexible”.

Not only did the students have fun, but we had so much fun ourselves!  Our normal days are pretty focused on course delivery, so it is really nice to have a bit of fun, welcome so amazing young people into the centre, and to inspire and shape the future workforce of Swindon and Wiltshire. Anything we can do to pay back to the local community by supporting students’ career development is time well spent by us.

We are looking forward to hosting the next one next week, and we would highly recommend any business who wants to share the enjoyment you have for your industry with the next generation, to get involved.