A New Generation

Gemma Fagbadegun

Our new team of Graduate Trainee staff started at IntoUniversity a couple of weeks ago, and it’s been great to see all these new faces on the team. We’ve been training them pretty solidly since they first arrived at the Head Office in August, and it’s great to see how efficient our recruitment process was - because they really do seem to believe in and emanate IU’s values: Quality, Talent, Aspiration, Teamwork and Compassion.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of joining in on a training session with the group, run by Christine de Cruz from SpeakersBank, a national network of professional trainers which is a part of Speakers Trust, a charity aiming to promote the development of speaking skills. We were all quite nervous at taking part in a public speaking workshop – despite being a confident and energetic group, no-one was too keen to get up in front of an audience and talk about a topic that really inspired them. But Christine’s enthusiasm won us all over, and in the end we had a great time both delivering our speeches in an effective and interesting way, and listening in turn to what everyone else had to say.

Sinead, a new Education Worker for our Brent centre, who hails from Sheffield but just spent a year living in Spain, spoke about walking the Camino De Santiago, a 900km ‘pilgrimage’ to a town in north-west Spain. London-born Laide, who’ll be joining the IU Bow team, alerted the group to the ongoing problems with racism in the UK. And Richard, originally from Edinburgh, and who’ll be helping out across our network of centres, gave us three reasons why everybody should use their vote.

It was a fascinating session to say the least, and I look forward to hearing more from this incredibly diverse and passionate group.