My name is Joe and I am 15 years old currently in year 11. Until recently I couldn’t make up my mind about what I wanted to do when I left school so i turned to the Connexions website for help.
This is how the website helped me….I found out about the website through a Connexions Personal Adviser that did a talk at our school. At first I didn’t think the website would be useful so I didn’t use it ,but more of my friends started using it and it was helping them make up their minds about what to do after finishing year 11.
I started by looking at the guidance notes of how to use the website and these gave me a good idea of where to start. Choices at 16 was the first page I visited and gave me an idea of what options were open to me. This told me that Kudos (the online careers questionnaire program) would be a good starting point to give me ideas on what careers I could go into.
I found Kudos straight forward to use, and it helped me think of some jobs that I had not even considered before. The other program on the website is Careerscape. I found this to have a lot of useful information and in particular fact sheets on the different jobs that I was considering I could go in to. Once I had got all the information I could from Kudos and Careerscape I was encouraged to use the Livechat function.
This allowed me to go online and talk to a real personal adviser about my options and what would be the best route for me to follow. I liked this system as I was able to access it in my own time when it was convenient for me, i didn’t have to book an appointment or wait to be seen. I honestly recommend this way of getting in touch with Connexions as I wouldn’t normally get a chance to talk to an adviser in school.
Although, the livechat is open two afternoons a week, I also had a question that I needed answering when it was closed but I was able to leave a message and a personal adviser answered the question very quickly.I still have not made my mind up 100% on what I want to do after year 11. However, using the Connexions website has really given me a good starting point and definitely given me more things to think about.
The Personal Adviser I spoke to has given me some research that I need to go away and do and I will write another blog entry next week once I have done the research and got back in touch with Connexion….Speak soon, Joe.
