Redsquid goes into the community to hold workshop for YMCA Youths in Watford

Having begun developing strong connections with YMCA earlier this year, Redsquid are committed to continue helping young people grow in confidence and achieve their goals. Our aim is to work with surrounding YMCA communities to help young people better prepare themselves for current and future employment.

We owe a lot to our younger members of staff, who’ve joined and grown with us over the years. But we want every budding entrepreneur to be given the same opportunities and experiences. So, we’ve been running workshops with YMCA’s East Watford branch, centred around teaching employability skills and educating young people about working life.

This time, Redsquid ventured down to one of YMCA’s community centres, designed to provide a place for young people to learn, socialise and grow. Our workshop focused on helping our attendees learn more about themselves, as potential job candidates, and gain some useful skills. The entire event was voluntary; with participants even taking time out of half-term and coming in after work.

After settling down and introducing ourselves, we showed the attendees our recent recruitment video; informing them of the kind of benefits a job with a company like Redsquid could provide. They seemed suitably impressed and motivated by what they saw, especially by the various seasonal events we’ve organised.

Our CEO Sohin Raithatha then started a discussion on what success means to the young people there; whether it was a challenging career or earning a good salary or having a high profile. Their responses were intriguing and genuine; with many citing having a good family life as being a worthy achievement.

Talk quickly moved onto the attendees’ passions; what shaped their desires and motivated them. For some, current hobbies provided work inspiration; Ben confessed that he enjoyed playing Rugby and wanted to pursue a career in the area. For others, it was family life and providing care; with Rhianne looking to help teach children with learning disabilities.

From there, the Redsquid team focused on helping their attendees gain the skills necessary to achieve the careers they wanted; with Natasha, our customer services team leader, running interview exercises designed to help build communication and good team-work.

Redsquid PA and HR manager Chelsey, and Head of Account Management Hayley, then held a competition in which participants had to identify and correct errors on a sample CV. The exercise helped educate several of the kids on what a CV was and why it’s so important to employability, with our winner successfully finding and correcting most of the errors.

Finally, our group discussed the subject of differing learning styles and how to successfully apply these to working situations. A traditional learning-style questionnaire was handed out, which our attendees were quite engaged by (apparently, I’m an Activist/Pragmatist), and various questions were answered.

The feedback we received for the workshop was very positive, with many attendees citing the CV challenge as being a highlight; with James saying it was good because: “I am a training manager, so I’ll be handling CV’s a lot”, and Micky enjoying the activity because: “I didn’t know how to write one before”. Redsquid YMCA events seem to be a hit with the group in general, with James once again praising our efforts: “I always enjoy events that Redsquid sets up for us”.

Once again, thank you to the Watford YMCA branch for taking their time out to help organise and run our workshop. We’ll be paying YMCA a visit once again, this time at their branch in Hatfield, so keep an eye out on our blog for future trips, and consider donating or applying for voluntary work.