For Careers Day, Lower Sixth pupils engaged in a variety of activities including team building, writing and interview practice, with judges and mentors available to provide guidance and assessments.

Congratulations to our winners Ella J and George W and runners up Felippe L and Gilbert H, and well done to all participants.

Special thanks go to the parents, past and present, ORs and Governors who volunteered their time and expertise to make this event such a success, and the OR Society and Ryland Communications for kindly donating prizes.

Careers Day At King’s (Otherwise known as productive panic)

Press Release, King’s Consulting, midday.

The tension builds, the crowd starts to hush, the adjudicator starts the stopwatch – ready, set! – oh. The marble falls. Whoops.

Today King’s School Rochester, an independent school saturated with competitive teenagers of dubious actual ability, is hosting a careers day for their Lower Sixth students. Resist turning away – it’s more exciting than it sounds.

Taking a selection of the consultants of the future (little do they know it), the school set about instructing the students in various missions sure to test not only their skills, but their bravery too, especially given the impromptu speech demands made periodically throughout the morning, both to sell products and to illustrate a level of confident professionalism – no mean feat for an otherwise bleak Wednesday in April.

To begin, what better than an array of coloured paper and the instruction: make a marble roller coaster, and make it go slow. Easier said than done. Looking around the hall, there was a variation in approaches, to put it lightly. The challenge did, admittedly, aim to highlight innovation, and innovation it did: on the left, the utter destruction of a table to little inevitable effect; on the right, alliteration to make the school’s english department swoon – the Terrific Treetop Tumble, a lengthy, slithering contraption built on pure faith, was the final victor, a treacherous trip for the tiny theme park-ees lasting just over 18 seconds. Amidst the shouts of would-be leaders, the screech of torn paper and the buzz of not-quite children given the freedom to wreck their usually immaculate school, the task had its purpose: to reveal characters, to encourage teamwork – of which one witness noted it was the best they’d seen in years – and to push the trainees out of their comfort zones. No rest for the wicked though – having watched their creations crumble under the keen eyes of the crowd, the prospective consultancy trainees were sent out and onto their next hurdles.

Now dispersed amongst a carousel of creative – and cruel, if you find your legs shaking at the idea of timed pressure – tasks, the students seek to whittle down their rivals and to impress the panel of experienced judges. There are prizes to be won, sure, but lessons to be learnt too, and friends to beat. Get ready; fallen tables certainly weren’t on the cards, so who knows what’ll come next.

The HEART of King’s never beat so loud.

Writing Task: After their first event of the day, candidates’ groups were merged and further tasks were given out. The first task for many was the ‘King’s Consulting Writing Task’ which aimed at focusing on how well they could adapt to a new situation, alongside how well they could write it up and document it. This task took the candidates 40 minutes and was a thrill to investigate who, in each group, was the most capable of taking a new piece of information completely unbeknownst to them and form a piece of writing out of it.

Carousel Activities: At the half-way mark of the day candidates were presented with four enticing activities for their groups to crack on with. These were methodically put together by the King’s Consulting team to accurately identify who was willing to display their ideals and to see if they aligned with the skill and qualities wanted by King’s Consulting:

Ambition
Leadership
Resilience
Confidence
Enquiry
Cooperation

Many of the candidates within their specific groups were able to mould themselves around each task and ensure they completed them to a high standard, high enough to stand out from the rest, bearing in mind they were looking for interviews after all.

Interviews: The interviews were taken up just after the group activities and were a great chance for each individual to display why they wanted to work for King’s Consulting and how exactly they would change the company for the better, explaining how they would be of great benefit to the company. The interviews were a chance for the employers to finally have a one to one conversation with the candidates that haven’t been exposed to an individualistic environment during their day.

Well done to everyone who took part!

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