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Careers - Administrator |
What's on the CD?
For each career, there's a page giving an overview of the career, showing what the career entails to a young audience who have little concept of the world of work. There's a page showing "Routes to Joining", and a page of Links to both local and National sites relevant to the career.
And then there's a page giving salary details. We are currently working on a new development, linking the CD to a web site with NHS National Pay Scales on it. That is expected to be available early in 2005. What's involved in having the CD tailored for our region? How does the user find a career? There are four ways to find a Career on the CD.
The careers are arranged in groups; Nursing, Dental, Doctor, AHP, Scientists & Technicians, Ambulance and Non- Clinical. Some groups have sub-groups. So to find a career in Dentistry for example, the user chooses the Dental group and then drills down! (sorry) to Dentist, Dental Hygienist, Dental Technician and Dental Therapist. Clicking on any of these will take the user straight to the page for that career.
For each question, the user is able to respond with a choice of a strong preference, a weak preference, a weak dislike or a definite "Not for me". The latter is a "blocker", so someone who says they definitely don't want to work shifts doesn't get matched to any shift working job. At the end of 40 questions, the programme shows the user 5 careers that are a close match to their preferences, and another 5 that they might like to think about. And as it's interactive, clicking on any of those careers will take them straight to that career page. Curious to see this working? Request a free sample pack now. Qualifications
Going Straight In If the user already knows that they want to be a Radiographer for example, they can click straight to that career. |
There are two accessibility options for the users, and they are chosen from the bottom left of the main menu screen using the large standard symbols for sight impaired and hearing impaired.
Improving Working Lives
Minimum System Requirements The CD is designed for a PC with Windows 98, Me, NT, 2000 or XP. It requires a 24x CD drive and a sound card. It requires Internet Explorer v 6.0 or later, which is part of all the later versions of Windows and is distributed free of charge under licence on the disk. It also requires Microsoft Windows Media Player, also part of the later versions of Windows and again distributed free of charge under licence on the disk. It will not run on the Mac platform or with early versions of Windows which are not multimedia enabled. Easy installation instructions for Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player are supplied with the disk, but rarely required. |
details of 70 different Career choices in the NHS. 12 of those careers
are explained using video, with a 5 minute video about each career; altogether,
there are over 60 minutes of high quality video on the CD.
For
each career, there's a "Day-in-the-Life" of page. Some are text
and graphics, others are audio diaries or even video in some cases. The
idea here is not just to show people what the career's like, but to capture
some of the enthusiasm of the young practitioners featured in the diary,
to show that the career is rewarding, that it's fun and that it's sociable.
By
Drilling Down
The
highly acclaimed Personal Preferences section is for those young people
who haven't a clue what they want to do. It asks them a series of 40 questions
about how they feel about various aspects of working life. For example,
there's a question about wearing uniform, one about shift work, one about
caring for others, one about driving, and the one that fascinates school
children, the "blood and guts" question. Each career is matched
to their answers. If they say, for example, they like the idea of caring
for others, the careers involving hands-on caring get promoted up the
list. If they say they don't enjoy driving, careers that involve driving
will get shuffled down the list and so on, question by question. 
Accessibility
Clicking
on the sight impaired symbol activates "Speech Agent"; with
this feature turned on, every piece of text that's rolled over by the
mouse is spoken out loud by an on-board speech synthesiser. This is shipped
as part of Windows 98 onwards and it is also distributed under free licence
on the disk. It's invaluable for sight impaired users, but most children
love to play with it too. 
Clicking
on the hearing impaired button activates the sub-title facility. Every
video clip is accompanied by a scrolling sub-title text that is normally
switched off. Clicking this button switches it on. This flexibility is
another first for the VideoActive NHS recruitment CD
Our
smiley appears on every page, and opens the door to "Improving Working
Lives" - only we've called it "Benefits of Working for the NHS".
It covers everything from the NHS Housing Initiative to The Work Life
Balance; from Childcare to the whole concept of the Agenda for Change.
We've presented it in a simple graphical form to enable children to understand
that the NHS is a really caring employer. Even if they don't get any of
the details, they'll be able to see the tremendous range of benefits,
which are generally not found in other industries.