Career Detectives Day introduced the World of Work, including a wide array of job and employability skills, to hoards of enthusiastic students in Year 8 at Great Marlow School. Included in the day were 18 local employers who rotated around the student groups to showcase their job roles. Before students were allowed any of this information freely, they were to interrogate each employer with a series of carefully pre-planned questions to attempt to identify their job, aided by a series of clues from the employers themselves. Although the teachers helped to facilitate, the year 8 students did an excellent job of questioning and investigating each employer put in front of them in order to figure out what they did for a living. True detectives were made.
For many students, this was their first encounter with an employer so after they had successfully unearthed, they were able to feedback and reflect with them about what they had learnt throughout the session.
Students were so excited to expose the information that many of them discovered job roles or industry information that not even the teachers knew! One theme of the day was honesty: both students and employers engaged readily to ensure that honest answers and questions were given such as ‘what don’t you like about your job role?’. This meant that students were able to build a realistic and honest picture of each career they came across in order to inform their future choices. For these students, taking an active role in uncovering each mystery led to exponential information about the World of Work and what it can offer.