Getting Involved – Staff Secondment

Teacher: My placement in Diagio involved a top to tail view of the business, from goods coming in to goods going out at the other end. I've also seen a lot of the admin work that goes on. I would hope that I would be able to take loads of information back to school, especially to the different departments within the school. Although I'm a Business Studies teacher I would hope to take information back to, for example, Maths, Art and Design, Geography, History and my own subject area.

Diageo Plant Manager (Leven): In terms of what the teachers will have learned, I think they key thing is they will have got a real insight into how we functionally operate as a business, in terms of from a systems point of view when an order comes into our system, how we process that order. How we plan, we need to turn that into a container load of goods going out the door. I really do genuinely believe they will have got a really good insight into the processes, the systems and hugely important (for us) for them to take back is the learning in terms of what attitudes and behaviours, what communications processes we go through, how we expect people to be able to interact with each other and treat each other in the right way, work as a team and I think there is some real benefits in there for them.

Teacher: I've found this work placement very valuable, I'm really glad I did it now and I would thoroughly recommend any teacher not just Business Studies teachers to come out and do it because the business world is changing all the time and I think we need to come out and see these changes.

Diageo Plant Manager (Leven): Apart from feeling good about ourselves, in terms of supporting education, which is something Diageo likes to do anyway, we also saw in the local community if we needed to employ people in future years we are also giving a couple of local teachers (and hopefully that would feed out), an insight as to what it's like to work in business in a major packaging site like ours. If that helps them to take that into the kids to give them a better view as to what it's like to work in industry, encompassed with the attitudes and behaviours we're actually looking for then that potentially in future years if we need to employ would have potentially assisted us because kids would have a better understanding of what it was like to work in industry, and a better idea of what, as a prospective employer, we were actually looking for.

Teacher: This placement probably has made me a better teacher, especially in business because I'm now confident that I can go in to my classroom and give them real life examples of what goes on in business.