There is one issue that is at the very heart of most job applications.

Unfortunately, most students don’t know what it is.

Many young people preparing to enter a workplace for the first time assume they know which skills and attributes employers are looking for.   Unfortunately, in making this assumption, those young people make a grave mistake.

As a result, the way in which the applicant presents him/herself is one which is likely to lead to a rejection.  As a result, applicants can come to see employers as out of touch with the modern world, while the employers see applicants as out of touch with the needs of business.

At the heart of the matter is what are often called “emotional and social competencies”; what are more commonly known as “people skills”.  For many employers have come to realise that generally only about one third of the difference between an excellent employee and an average employee relates to technical skills and cognitive ability.

The rest of the difference between a highly effective employee and an average employee comes in the form of these emotional and social competencies.

Which raises the question, how can we show students who are starting on the journey to employment, what employers are looking for?  In effect, how can they express their social and emotional competencies to those who might give them a job?

The first step must be for the student to understand his/her own social and emotional competencies. Which is why Belbin has produced GetSet – a way of helping students find out about themselves in relation to what employers tend to look for.

GetSet is a set of questionnaires that school students can complete on-line and which generate a detailed set of reports revealing the student’s strengths.  As a result, the students can best present themselves in applications to higher education and to employers.

To help you see how GetSet works, we are happy to offer you or one of your students the chance to take the GetSet questionnaire yourself at no cost or obligation. Then if you feel it would be helpful, you can arrange for the questionnaire to be made available to those students whom you nominate.

To apply for a free questionnaire for yourself or one of your students, please click here – click the contact us at the top of the page and write ‘a free one please’ in the box. To read more about GetSet, please do look at our website here www.belbingetset.com. Or if you have any questions, please email getset@belbin.com or phone 01223 264975.

Lisa Ward

It’s not just the need for an Assembly each day, it’s the need to make each one relevant to the moment

Indeed for many school managers and teachers who deliver assemblies this issue of finding the right assembly to fit with a particular theme or topic is one that many note as the most time consuming aspect of running assemblies.

Which is why the creation of a series of 350 outstanding assemblies that both engage the pupils, and which they will remember over time, was only the first part of our enterprise.

What we have also done is broken those 350 assemblies into 12 categories so that when you need an assembly to fit a particular topic, it becomes easy to find.

The result of this endeavour is The Assembly Box.

Each assembly is fully scripted, and the index allows you to choose your assembly by topics as diverse as community, citizenship, saints’ days, black history, social and emotional stories, and so on.

What’s more, each assembly comes with its own supporting presentation material and a set of ready-to-use key word cards. The assemblies can be downloaded and printed out, thus making them immediately usable without further preparation.

You can read a full example of one of our assemblies by following this link

Additionally you can see the complete list of the 12 main categories our assemblies are divided into on our website, and from there you can go into each category and see the details of all the assemblies on offer.

All the details are available at http://www.assemblybox.co.uk where you can also order on line.

The complete set of all of our assemblies costs £149 (+ VAT). If you have any questions please email enquiries@assemblybox.co.uk