Ricoh boost pupils employability

Monday, October 9th, 2017

Lauren Meritt, Business Generation Executive, Ricoh, reflects on their participation in the Skills @ Work programme with St. Kevin’s College, Ballygall, Dublin. 

As a proud member of Business in the Community Ireland (BITCI), Ricoh Ireland is always excited to take part in its Skills @ Work programme. For the past two years, we have partnered with St. Kevin’s College, a community school in Ballygall, Dublin. The goal of the programme is to introduce post-primary school students to the professional world. Comprising of five sessions, the programme is designed to elevate each student’s professional skillset and put it into practice.

Last year, 13 students from St Kevin’s joined us at our new Dublin HQ for a site visit, where we shared with them our collaboration spaces and allowed them to experiment with the different technologies we provide at Ricoh. Since that skills@workinitial meeting in January, our students have taken part in four subsequent sessions, during which we helped them to build their CV writing skills, practice mock interviews with Ricoh team members and experience day-in-the-life in the working world. Finally, the students gave a presentation on what they learned during their time with Ricoh.

The students’ favourite activity was practicing their presentation skills, where we at Ricoh took a different spin on things. After going through some essential presentation skills, we then practiced some New World of Work (NWoW) approaches. In doing so, we split the students into two meeting rooms and asked them to practice their presentation skills through the unified communications system. More and more today, we explained to them, companies are cutting costs and increasing efficiencies by hosting digital meetings. This NWoW approach requires individuals to develop new communication and presentation skills to suit.

My colleague and I joined the students at St. Kevin’s for their final presentations. Impressively, the skills@workstudents were not nervous and presented their various topics, covering everything from music genres and football, to why students should take a transition year and what they plan to do after college. At the end of their slides, they spoke about why they would want to work for a company like Ricoh. The students highlighted what they learned from their participation in the programme. The most valuable of these learnings, in my opinion, was that they told us they learned confidence.

In the very last presentation, one of the students said he had been hired for a part-time job thanks to the help Ricoh was able to provide in the Skills @ Work programme. The team at Ricoh Ireland could not have been happier to participate in this programme and to help the students at St. Kevin’s College develop valuable life skills. We look forward to seeing their progress in the future!

skills@workClass of 2017!