Why study this course?
Lynne Johnson, one of the contributors to this course, will now give you a bit of background into why you might like to study this course.
Transcript
Hello, I’m Lynne Johnson, and I’m one of the careers advisors at The Open University. Welcome to the Planning a better future course. By studying this course, you’ll be taking your first steps into developing a better future for yourself.
There may be many reasons why you’ve chosen to study this course. It might be to help you think about where you're going in your career, and what you’d like to achieve, or simply for personal interest, and to develop your confidence as a learner.
If you complete the short assessment at the end of each section, you'll be able to collect badges. These virtual badges provide a form of recognition for your learning and you can display them on your social media profiles – for example LinkedIn and Facebook.
Planning a better future is made up of three sections. In Section 1, you will consider how you got here, reflecting on your roles in life, your confidence in those roles, and positive and negative experience you've had; and realising your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Section 2 will look at where you want to go, and the changes you want to make. This section will enable you to gather information and consider what options are available to you and lastly, Section 3 covers how to get to your planned destination. This involves creating your own action plan, looking up possibilities of work experience, voluntary work, networking, and creating contacts. It also considers how to compete job applications, and prepares you for interviews. Finally, you will look at using social media to aid in networking.
At the end of the three sections, you will find information on next steps, which will signpost you to relevant websites and resources relating to further development of your learning in relation to planning a better future.
We do encourage you to study every section of this course, as each section is relevant to the next one, and often refers to activities previously carried out. The course is flexible, and there’s no time limit for completion. You can take it in small chunks, working whenever you like.
We recommend you try to engage with all of the sections in order to receive a statement of participation at the end, which recognises the learning outcomes you have met. You can then show this to your employer as evidence of your learning, if you wish.
There are guided activities throughout the course, which will help you to reflect upon your own practise, and a range of interactive quizzes at the end of each section, which gives you the opportunity to earn your badge for that section. You might find it useful to talk about your work in this course with a friend, partner, or work colleague. It might help you to stay motivated, and also give you new ideas.
I do hope you enjoy the course, and I wish you luck for your future career development.
The guided activities throughout this course will help you to reflect on your life-long and life-wide experiences to help you to plan for a better future. Throughout the course you will find activities that ask you to write down your thoughts and feelings based on the issues being discussed. There will be a few simple questions that encourage you to focus your thinking. It would be helpful for you to spend some time thinking about what you have learned within each section, and how it relates to your current situation and future goals.
These activities are not there to test you, but designed to help you reflect in more detail upon what you have read. These activity spaces are entirely for your own use to help you recognise what you have learned. Nobody else will see what you write here. The aim is to help you become more reflective, by bringing together aspects of both your personal and work experiences so you can review and learn from them.
Here’s an interview with Daniel Morrissey about combining work and study.
Transcript
The following interview demonstrates the importance of support from mentors and family.
Transcript
I’m Robin Howard. I’m directly responsible for menswear and childrenswear at Boden. Boden is a direct mail company based in London, and we sell clothing around the world, basically. Our main markets are America and the UK.
What I cover and the bits that I enjoy the most I suppose are what I would call the creative side, the idea of creating things, be it clothing or whatever. Even down to a colour palette, choosing colours, I find, I’ve always found really quite exciting. I like that vitality. That’s the thing that’s kept me alive, I suppose, for 50 odd years.
I think I was always creative, I was quite very artistic. I could draw. I followed in my mother’s footsteps and I did art for O-level, certainly. And I was always sketching, drawing things, cars or hands. I used to draw my hands all the time. I don’t know why. But I never really understood it. I didn’t think of it of something I could use in a career. It was just something that I enjoyed.
I did flounder, actually. I didn’t know what to do when I left school. I had no idea. And in fact, when I did leave school eventually I didn’t go to university because I felt I wanted to get out there and get on. I actually worked as a builder, as a plasterer’s mate and did bricklaying and plastering and all sorts of stuff for about six to nine months, which I really enjoyed. Because it was kind of creating something. I suppose that was pushing me in that direction.
And my father was an accountant and he said, well if you can’t decide on anything else to do go and be an accountant. So I went to Poly and I went for a term and failed the exam, thank god, by one point. And so they kicked me out, which I was very pleased about. Because my father had forced me, in a sense, press ganged me into going to do it. In failing I walked out of that door feeling pretty good, actually. And if I’d gone down that route it would’ve been a hideous disaster.
From that point I kind of felt I should go into retailing. I don’t know why. Something just told me that that’s what I should do. Harrods, bless them. There was a woman there who I met, she was the personnel director who interviewed me first time round. And she kind of took a shine to me in the nicest possible way. And she, in fact, became my first mentor. And she made me work on the shop – well, I worked as a stockroom boy, basically. You know, sweeping the floors and putting stock away down in the dungeons of Harrods’ building in London.
Then I became what they call an executive trainee there. So I kind of fell into that quite by luck. But the thing that got me going was this woman.
My wife, I have to bring her into it. Again, it probably sounds a bit twee, but we live on the Isle of Wight, this company is based in London. For 10 years I’ve spent five days a week in London and the weekend at home. I could never have done that without that trust. And she understands that I really, really enjoy this job. And actually, what’s the point in getting in the way of that?
My highest point in my career, which sounds really corny, is working here at Boden. Because what I’ve been able to do here over the last 10 years is pull all the kind of experience that I’ve had around the world – because I’ve worked in various countries – together, and help build this business. So I’m sitting on the top of the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done. And I absolutely love it.
Structure of the course