Our Second Award As A ‘Centre of Excellence Employer’ For Two Years Running

We are very proud and delighted to be awarded, for the second successive year, The Manchester College Industry Excellence Partnership award.

The MPostcode Business Hub started in earnest in 2019, and as a Start-Up we appreciated all the help and support offered to us to help us build our vision for the future.

After a conversation with Jenny Hudson, Employability & Partnership Coordinator for The Manchester College, we welcomed Elias to join us as part of his Industry Work Experience Placement. This is a 315-hour work placement over several months, with a fully vetted employer where the student is able to gain actual hands-on experience within a real working environment.

Elias fitted right in from the very beginning and within days was proving to be a valuable member of our team. Working alongside Anthony Kyle (Kyle) our Events & Membership Manager, Elias was given the responsibility of Membership Coordinator which meant it was his job to make sure that every new member was quickly and efficiently added to our website as part of the directory. Using his web and development skills, Elias proved to be competent, reliable, and efficient at navigating through the complexities of our website and delivering good solid code for each new member listing. This allowed Kyle and the rest of the team to be able to keep building the community of businesses connected with MPostcode to grow and thrive.

All of us at MPostcode were sorry to see Elias go at the end of his placement with us, which was sadly cut short by the events caused by the initial lockdown from the Pandemic.

It was because of the incredibly positive experience we had with Elias, that we were very eager to continue our relationship with The Manchester College and continue to offer workplace experience placements to their students.

The challenges created for industry and education need not be described here, as we are sure that all of us remember how almost everything shutdown during the early part of 2020. Thankfully, MPostcode was able to keep pressing ahead with its activities, although on a limited scale than before, and was able to step forward once more and offer another work experience opportunity to The Manchester College.

Moving forward.

We are now in 2021, and in November of 2020 we were once again delighted to welcome yet another Industry Work Experience student to join our team. Antonio started working with us at the end of 2020, and even during the lockdown at the start of 2021, Antonio also proved himself to be an incredibly valuable member of the MPostcode team.

After initially working with us at our offices in Manchester, Antonio showed himself to be competent, enthusiastic and again being able to take on the tasks first carried out by Elias, in a very effective way. Even working remotely, Antonio’s enthusiasm and dedication to the role has been outstanding, and we are very excited to be able to work face to face again with him in the next few days as we move slowly out of this period of lockdown and remote working.

We believe whole heartedly at MPostcode that it is hugely important to invest in the next generation of the workforce, to allow them to gain valuable skills and experience of working alongside others and to develop a feel what for future employers may come to expect of them.

Thankfully, gone are the days when it was regarded that young people on ‘work experience’ were simply there to make drinks and sweep up. No, it is our aim to commit to offering every young person in the first steps of learning about working in the real world, as full and complete experience of doing real work as possible with the aim of making it a valuable learning and rewarding experience for everyone involved.  Kyle has now mentored two students and is looking forward to working with more in the future.

Our message to all employers who may still believe that working with work experience students can be demanding on their time and resources, therefore thinking that it can be ‘too much effort’ for them, it is time to step back and understand just how much these young people can offer and bring so many skills and valuable work to the people they work alongside.

We would like to thank The Manchester College once again for presenting MPostcode Business Hub this prestigious award and for offering us the opportunity to benefit from working with their students.