St Luke’s is so much more than just hands on care. While the care is an intrinsic part of our service, there are so many cogs moving in the background keeping our charity running.
Every member of the St Luke’s team works tirelessly to ensure that our services are the best they can be and for some that means working hard beyond their day job.
This coming week is National Apprenticeship Week (10 – 16 February), a chance to celebrate our apprentices at St Luke’s and shine a light on how they are working to develop and strengthen their own skillsets.
Kat Chandler is our Retail Business Manager, coordinating the day to day running of our thriving retail arm of St Luke’s. She is currently doing a Level 6 Degree Apprenticeship in Professional Management Practice.
Kat fits in her apprenticeship around her full-time role within our busy retail team, spending one day a week focusing on her studies.
She said: “My study day is a Tuesday, this means a three hour morning lecture and then I spend the afternoon consolidating what we’ve learned that morning and applying it to my assignment questions. Because it’s an apprenticeship the study is all based around the workplace, so the tutors introduce management theories and then send you off to apply them to real situations in St Luke’s.
“Having the opportunity to apply my learning immediately to real life scenarios has been so valuable for me. As a passionate employee of St Luke’s it’s also been a great opportunity to learn more about the organisation and increase my internal network.
“I find the Tuesday to be enough to get all of the uni work done, and with support from my line manager my role as Business Manager has shifted around this day out of the office. I was worried I wouldn’t have enough time to fit everything in and while it’s busy, it’s manageable.”
So would she recommend it to others?
“I think anyone who has the drive to learn and the ambition to further their career could benefit from an appropriate apprenticeship – and the really fantastic thing is that it’s free – utilising the apprenticeship levy means that St Luke’s aren’t out of pocket and I don’t have to fund the studies myself.”
Sarah Wallis is one of our Partnership Leads at St Luke’s, working within our fundraising team.
She is currently undertaking a Level 3 Fundraising Apprenticeship with Corndel and is due to complete her final assessment in May. She said: “It basically gives me three qualifications in one – the Corndel qualification, the Level 3 NVQ in Fundraising and the Chartered Institute of Fundraising qualification so it’s a really good course to have – it’s a ‘nice to have’ in all our job specifications but very few people have it.
Sarah decided to take on the apprenticeship as she wanted to add more depth to her role within the St Luke’s fundraising department.
“I just wanted to work on something which gave me much greater insight into other areas of fundraising I don’t cover in my role (legacies and bid and trusts for instance) and it has given me a much greater understanding of fundraising as a whole rather than my part of it in the community team. It has also built me a great network of contacts in other hospices and charities up and down the country which I would never have had if it wasn’t for the apprenticeship programme with Corndel.
“I was lucky to obtain a fully funded place worth £8,000 at no cost to St Luke’s, but the course is online with lots of evidence required from applying my learning to my role at St Luke’s and lots of workshops and 1-2-1 time with my tutor at Corndel and my line manager Nina, who has played an active part in the course.”
As a busy mum, Sarah has had to juggle work, home life as well as studying, but has been putting in the effort and believes it has all been worth it.
“It’s really not easy to juggle the demands of completing coursework on time and at certain times of the year, particularly Christmas, when we were really busy in the fundraising team, this can be hard but you would be amazed at the amount of different times I have naturally pulled through the things I have been learning on the course into my every day work.
“Completing this course is definitely making me a better fundraiser! I am proof that you are never too old to stop learning new things!”
As a hospice, we can offer a number of different apprenticeships and placements ranging from administration to events management, retail logistics to health and social care, roles in finance to leadership and management.
To learn more about an apprenticeship with St Luke’s click here.
BLOG: Company kindness helps keep the wheels of local hospice care turning