Across three days in September – we were joined by many presenters, Global Academy alumni and leaders from the commercial, technology and programming teams as part of the induction programme for Year 10 and Year 12 students.
The sessions which were located on the Global roof top – gave our students the chance to see behind the scenes of Europe’s largest commercial radio and outdoor media company at their headquarters in the heart of Leicester Square.
Previous Global Academy students who are now completing an apprenticeship or are employed by Global were our hosts and gave us an Access All Areas tour of the building – allowing students to see first-hand what a professional media company and office culture looks like. We even got the chance to get into some of the live radio studios of the biggest radio brands in the country (and one group even got a shout out on air by Manny Norte to millions of people on Capital XTRA!)
As well as building tours – we spent time together in small teams looking at the values of both Global Academy and Global HQ – Strive, Pride, Simple and Respect – and started to explore how we would implement this at the Academy over the coming year.
To top the experience off – students got the chance to be part of Q&A panel events featuring a range of on air talents such as Heart’s Matt Wilkinson and Pandora, Capital XTRA’s Yinka and Shayna Marie, LBC’s Natasha Devon and Kamilla Rose and Rio Fredrika from Capital as well as leaders from key departments such as Technology and Commercial. Our students also heard from those who were ‘in their seat’ a few years ago with the chance to spend time with Global Academy alumni who’re now working at Global including Jasmine Royes (Capital XTRA Producer), Katie Larsen (Podcasts Coordinator) and Andrew Bottcher (Heart Network Producer) who graduated in 2018 and Jacob McCormak (Heart Network Production Apprentice) who graduated last Summer.
It was a really rewarding experience for our students to really experience life in the industry and give them an opportunity to both get a glimpse of their future career and see first-hand what industry-standard behaviour looks like.
