Careers Week 2025
This year Careers Week started with a visit from journalist Beverley Woolford. She works for Reach, the UK’s largest commercial, national and regional news publisher. They work with national brands from the Mirror, Express and OK to local brands such as Surrey Live. Beverley outlined her journey into journalism and talked about the range of jobs needed to bring a newspaper to print. She shared the secret to preparing a newspaper front page.
Thomas Feane joined us on Tuesday to talk about his ‘unconventional’ career journey. Thomas is Head of Operations at the Sarah Raven Gardening company. Tom shared with the pupils that he has a diagnosis of ASD and ADHD. He explained that the expected route of college and university after school just did not work for him. Instead, he started volunteering using his passion for sailing to build up some work experience.
Everyone likes a pie! Well, most of our pupils do, when asked by Christian Barrington from Mud Foods. Christian described how one day he was driving home from his work in sales and felt that he really wanted to do something different for a career, something he had a strength and passion for. He remembered making pies with his Grandmother and decided to focus his next career move on his love for cooking.
Wednesday brought the army to school to talk with the Year 7 and 8s. They had a fun and informative morning learning about what it’s like to work day to day in the British Army. Corporal Jones and Lance Corporal Pearson explained that there are lots of jobs in the army. The pupils were able to suggest some army jobs they knew about such as engineering, catering and medics. Pupils were then told about the huge range of sporting activities available in the army, football, hockey, skiing, swimming, just too many to mention! It was then time to try on some of the kit, look at the survival food rations and take part in an army drill.
It’s never too young to find out about the working world! KS2 took part in a job carousel run by the staff at St Dominic’s. The children were fascinated to learn that some staff had worked in other job roles before coming to work at school. They spent fifteen minutes at each job station, learning about life in the Cold Stream Guards, retail and being a chef. Practical activities such as marching, trying on a bearskin, icing cakes and playing a product price matching game brought the career areas to life.
We were so lucky to have a beautiful sunny day on Thursday as the Year 10 and 11 DT pupils went outside to find out more about the job of land surveying from our guest, Tom Jordan from SJM Surveys. Using a range of technical instruments such as GPS, prism pole and an electronic distance measurer the pupils were able to measure, map and collect data from our paddock identifying the boundaries and manholes.
We want to say a BIG thank you to all our guests this week who have given up their time to come and talk with and inspire our pupils and students who are just at the start of considering their own career pathways.