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St. James's Place, a Wealth Management firm in London gave our Finding Futures Students from Welbourne Primary School an authentic taste of what it felt like to work at their company in a 9-5 job.
Upon arrival, they first gave all of our students a name tag with a bar-code. This allowed each student to enter into the facility. As you can imagine, each student having their own "top-secret" bar-code identification card, elicited great excitement; however a teaching moment paralleled this excitement. The identification card showcased the importance of St. James's Place and the work that they do for their clients. But also, prompted a conversation about confidentiality and proprietary information.
After passing security, the students went up to the 4th floor and were greeted by members of staff.
In order to get to know what St. James's Place does and what Wealth management means, the staff created an activity in which they asked questions with information and history surrounding the financial industry.
On the projector a question would be listed with 2 answers; each student went either to the left or the right-hand side of the room depending on which answer they believe to be true or false.
It is here that our students learned that there are £100m bank notes called Titans that are safely guarded in the Bank of England’s vault! As you can imagine this not only shocked our students, but also prompted them to engage in a very interesting conversation. It is at this moment where the students settled into their surroundings and used their communication skills and confidence to ask the representatives questions.
Following this activity, our Finding Futures students engaged in a Speed Networking activity with people from various departments within St. James's Palace. They used their Four Talents, Confidence, Communication, Resilience, and Self-Awareness, to ask probing questions such as:
'What do you do here?'
'Is this the job you always imagined you'd have?'
''Where do you see yourself in five years?'
Following the quick Q&A, the students were asked to get into teams and come up with different characteristics that they think are imperative for representatives or employees of St. James's Palace to have. Answers ranged from "being intelligent' to "kindness".
At the end of the day our students went back to Welbourne Primary School with a sense of what Wealth Management is and a few of them indicated that not only would they want to one day work there but they would also want to create the type of products and services that St. James's Place might invest in.
What a wonderful and productive world of work day! Thank you St. James's Place for your time and your energy.
To find out more about how your students could get involved with the Yes Futures Programmes, please contact Sophie, Impact Manager: sophie@yesfutures.org, 07908 687779 or visit our website.
If you're interested in becoming a World of Work partner, please contact Helena, Head of Programmes: helena@yesfutures.org.