On Tuesday 20 June Civil Service Live came to Gateshead and I had the opportunity to attend to help and promote Civil Service Local and the Academy in particular. I am an Instructional Officer for the Prison Service and I’m also a current delegate on the North East Academy. My Academy family (Fifty Shades of Green) chose as our group project to promote the Local Academy throughout the region to help improve awareness of development opportunities available to Civil Servants.
I met a wide variety of people from different departments some of which were new to me and ranged from AO to the SCS. Many interested in the Local Academy were directed to us from the very popular Spot Mentoring and Competency Workshop being run at the Event while others were just keen to see what opportunities were available to help them progress in their careers. I spent my time speaking with people sharing my experiences of the Academy and identifying what it could offer them as Delegates, Facilitators and Mentors.
One standout moment of the day was meeting with John Manzoni, Chief Executive of the Civil Service who was interested to hear about my experiences both in the Prison Service and at the Local Academy. Another valuable part of the day was meeting some former delegates from the North West Local Academy (The Wolf Family, 2015) who had been invited to the Live Event to give their presentation on improving public perception of the Civil Service. They invited me to their talk which was very powerful and clearly showed the success of the project they engaged in two years ago, highlighting the value placed on the excellent work done by Academy delegates.
I thoroughly enjoyed the Live Event and would recommend any Civil Servant consider attending should the opportunity arise. Hopefully I did my family proud in helping to promote the Local Academy, I certainly gained some useful information which will be of great benefit to our group project.
News about how to get involved in the next CS Local Academy coming soon.