Life Skills

The Life skills sessions are designed to enable you to look at fundamental attitudes, behaviours and skills that are necessary in everyday working life. They are split into 5 separate sessions and are focused on improving your abilities to secure employment.

The different sessions cover:
Self-awareness
Personal Presentation
Body Language
Managing Money
Coping with Stress

It is important to ensure that you understand the reasons why these ‘life skills’ are so vital and are fundamental in your success to finding employment. Discuss reasons why you feel life skills are important. Answers will include:
A lack of confidence will come across at an interview; I need confidence if I am going to succeed.
I need to know how to manage my money so that I can afford my travel expenses prior to receiving my first salary cheque.
Stress can impair performance at a job interview etc.

Self Awareness

Description

During this session, you will gain an awareness of who you are, what you can offer an employer and will have assistance in mapping out your future life plan. Repeat the opening exercise but concentrate specifically on Self Awareness and ensure that you understand what this is and why it is important.

Activity: 1

a) Personal Perceptions

Break into pairs to discuss your perceptions of each other and how these were formed – this will include a discussion about each other’s assets and capabilities. At the end of the discussion, you will have to present back to the group about the other participant, giving an outline of how you perceived the other participant, how the other participant reacted to these perceptions and what you jointly considered were the other participants main assets and capabilities.

b) Personal Awareness & Life Planning

On an individual basis, produce a pictorial life plan, which uses colour and pictures to show how the you feel about your life currently and how you wish it to develop (both on a personal and professional basis). You will then be asked to present your plan to the group and a discussion will take place.

c) Use of Diagnostic Tools

You will have the opportunity within the session, to use some Internet-based diagnostic tools, within which you will be required to answer a series of life, career and work questions, resulting in a personal and/or career profile. Using the diagnostic tools adds another fun element into the session and you will be able to print out and save your personal or career profiles, for use in other modules within the programme and to discuss with your trainer and/or colleagues.

d) Identifying Personal Assets & Matching to Employer Needs

Discuss questions in groups and as individuals, to stimulate debate:

· Is there anything that made your academic or vocational qualifications a 'special' achievement? - e.g. was there a particular difficulty you had to overcome or was the outcome particularly noteworthy in some respects.
· Is there any activity that you undertake as a leisure pursuit or hobby where you have made use of particular skills or achieved success that could be interesting to an employer?
· If you have had previous full time or part-time employment, identify your achievements. What did you learn - were you promoted etc?
· Do you undertake any voluntary work or similar - what skills are needed here and what relevance could these have in the workplace?
· Think about situations and their outcomes where you have been able to demonstrate the following skills rated as important by employers:

Life Skills Part 2

Advertise with Get me A Cool Job