I found my trumpet. One of the most exciting things I’ve had the opportunity to do this term is work with the Student Development and Activities teams to deliver some training to club officers on the Union generally, specialist topics like Health & Safety, Finance and Marketing and, most recently, Budgeting.

T is for training.

We are not done. I want to spend the next term spending some time looking at the way we train club volunteers and student staff, to make sure it’s delivering what you need, when you need it. The vision is a comprehensive, easy to understand, training programme, that you can get to printed, online or in person, and lets you do what you need to do with the minimum of going back to ask again.

A lot of the focus with this training is going to be handover. I’d like to give new committees something to work on together during the summer term – maybe Freshers’ Fair – so that they get some valuable time shadowing. A lot of club handovers are great. It’s just about picking off those last few.

We know that people like how interactive the new style of club training is, and having a face to face mentor you can reach out to if you’ve got questions is something that helps clubs and the staff mentors – we had some feedback a couple of weeks ago that told us how exciting it was to work with students on the ground. Watch this space for more developments as the year goes forward. 

Some of the ideas we’ve had for other training sessions have been Train the Trainer style courses, sessions on web design, and things to do with conflict management and managing difficult people – that last one actually cropped up a few times.

What do you think? Is there a training session that you think clubs should be doing? What other support we can give you at the beginning of a term, now that you’re at the end?

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Objective Check-in:

Continue to improve the training that’s delivered to new club officers – in progress. We’ve collected the feedback, and we’re trying to work on a more holistic approach at the beginning of next yeor.

Develop practical and targeted sessions aimed at specific committee roles – in progress. We ran a series of sessions on lots of different topics. Work for next year is going to be on getting those down pat, and trying to branch out into the more technical areas.

Assist Management Groups to develop their own training sessions - queued. We'll be collecting some feedback about budgeting training in the new year so that we know what goes on already, and work from there!