Navigating the waters ahead - careers and personal development support

Navigating your career and transitions along the way can be confusing and that’s before you add in the impact of cancer. Our Wider Horizons careers series comes to a close with advice from our Parent Trustee and professional Careers Consultant, Emma Francis.

As part of our Virtual Summer programme this year, we included the Wider Horizons Programme as a way of introducing young people to different career options and providing young people with resources you can use throughout your careers going forward. We hope you have found the information we provided useful and that it will help you when choosing your career path going forward.

In this final Wider Horizons part, our Trustee, Emma - whose daughter Martha has been supported by the Trust in recovery from leukaemia - has put together some awesome careers advice resources, to help you plan out your future career and show you how to use your skills and experience, some of which you might have gained through the Trust, to good use.

Emma said: "Navigating your career and transitions along the way can be confusing and that’s before you add in the impact of cancer. Through your experiences with the Trust we want to help you feel more confident in your next steps, whatever they might be. So to round up Wider Horizons we thought it might be helpful to pull together some careers advice and guidance to help you with your next steps, whatever stage you maybe at.

"To help navigate these confusing waters, it can be helpful to spend some structuring your thinking around the following questions and offer a career plan as a template (see attached) to record your ideas. These resources will hopefully help set you on the right course for your future career."

Click to download the resources here...

• Wider Horizons – Emma's Careers and Personal Development Support Guide.
• Career Development Plan template.

Wider Horizon wouldn’t have been possible without all of the help we got from our partners, skippers, Trustees and Graduate Volunteers, so we just want to say thank you for all their help and their willingness to get involved. For our ‘Careers at Sea’ series we need to thank Trust Skipper, John Davies and his colleague Abbie, our Operations Manager North, James Hall, and Captain Alice Duncan from our partners at Red Funnel. The full Trust Operations Team also took part in a from 'Bedside to Shoreside' Blog series, which shines a light on some the career options available at charities and how to get involved.

We also need to thank Graduate Volunteer, Ed Yelland, who took part in our Instagram Live Q&A about his career as a theatre actor which was highly popular and is still available to view on our Instagram Page. Ed has also previously featured on the ‘My Life Now’ Series, where we interview young people who have sailed with the Trust to gain an insight into their lives and careers after being helped by the Trust. These feature monthly in our Trust News newsletter and could also be very helpful with career ideas - never miss a My Life Now by signing up to receive the newsletter here.

We look forward to seeing where your careers take you!