Making work placements a Dream

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The Responsive Family support an amazing company ‘Centre for Leadership Performance’ which have been running a “dream placement” scheme for many years. “The Dream placement scheme has been co-created with businesses across Cumbria who want to connect with their future workforce and showcase the breadth of opportunities within their organisations. The scheme gives all young people who apply development opportunities and a chance to come together with employers for meaningful dialogue and engagement at each stage of this 6-month programme.”

This year we had interviewed 3 candidates and 1 wildcard candidate which were identified via the application process. The outcome was blissful, with two of the candidates being Charlotte Nann & wildcard candidate, Christian Lofthouse. Both had Strong interview skills, showing confidence, passion and plenty of knowledgable answers! The Responsive staff members were confident they had found two fantastic candidates that would fit right into the Core Values we abide by.

And what a week they’ve had…. from spending time with our Weld Inspection technicians, customer service and business admin team, destructive testing technician and learning about our processes and how we have developed our business structure in the past year. We had the pleasure of introducing Charlotte and Christian to Responsive Ltd on the 17th February 2020, They both spent a few hours with some of our Inspectors who talked about their roles and procedures within responsive and a basic introduction to NDT, which lead to a series of educational and practical sessions with them both. Christian said, “Speaking to the NDT technicians, was very interesting, and they gave us the opportunity to ask about their roles within responsive and how they worked with their customer”.

“Charlotte Nann & Christian Lofthouse demonstrated enthusiasm and the willingness to learn about Responsive and the team behind it” Mathew Tomkinson, Operations Director

Both the Dream placement candidates had a jam-packed week varying from trips to our customers, McMenon Engineering, Sellafield Ltd, Bendalls Engineering and Whitehaven Job Centre plus to interviewing staff members and completing an Integrated work placement project which was designed by the Dream placement’s supervisor, Mathew Tomkinson, giving Charlotte and Christian a challenging experiment to “build on Responsive’s procedures and how to improve them” which gave the team a great opportunity to view their energy for STEM subjects and business improvement opportunities.

“Both of our dream placement students, Charlotte and Christian took any ideas we gave them and run with them. Neither of the students were scared to ask myself or anybody else questions so that they could gage a better idea of Responsive. I enjoyed being able to tell the students about my own apprenticeship journey during their interviews with us.”

Olivia Winter, Customer Service Apprentice




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