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Thursday, 17 July 2014

Skillstep: Week 8

I have now finished week 7 of the Skillstep course! The group and I only have one more week left of vocational work before undertaking our work placements for the following fortnight!

In Tuesday's session, Maureen prompted the group and I to think of skills and qualities that make a successful employee and again for a good team player; and found that a lot of these qualities overlapped from to the other. We spent the rest of the session planning our presentation for next Tuesday where we will each be spending around 10 to 15 minutes presenting and talking about our future goals, the barriers involved, and how they meet the SMART target criteria. I have my presentation pretty much prepared for the next session - I just need to organise my props! My presentation will be focused on my short-term goal of crocheting at least 15 bunnies to sell for the Bright for Sight campaign, during October, to be displayed at the front desk of the Henshaws Manchester resource centre. I will provide more details of my goal and how the presentation went in next week's Skillstep post.

In Wednesday's session, we were visited from Nick who gave us a First Aid session for the day. We learned the ABCDE's of emergencies, how to call for help, how to give CPR, and how to put someone into the recovery position - as well as learning about conditions such as Diabetes, Heart Attacks, Asthma and Shock. It was a very informative session, and one of my favourites of the course, as it was very hands-on - we even got to practice on CPR Annie dummies! We each passed the First Aid assessments and will soon receive a certificate which will be valid for the next 3 years.

In Thursday's session, with Linda and Neil, we were introduced to Microsoft PowerPoint and were talked through the basic steps of how to set up a presentation with slides, animations and transitions and how to insert images. We were teamed up into pairs to create a PowerPoint presentation of the Skillstep course, with each slide representing a different factor of the course of our choosing. In next week's session, we will showcase our PowePoint presentations to the group, alongside giving a talk about the course using the bullet points from each slide as a prompt.

As I mentioned previously, next week is the final week of vocational work for the course - and will be quite an intense week - with 2 presentations and a mock interview!

You can find out more about Skillstep by clicking here and can register your interest to the course via e-mail.