New Volunteer IT Service

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Hi All,
Im an IT Officer in local government and Im investigating the possibility of launching a volunteer IT support service in the North West. The intention is to provide experience and qualifications for young people who have the potential to start a career in desktop support but need help to get started.
I have a potential customer base that doesn’t need commercial support but would benefit from volunteers and as unemployed young people have hit a record high I think there’s an opportunity to help out.

What Im looking for are your opinions on what desktop support qualifications a potential employer is looking for as a first step to employment. I have my own ideas and Ill be speaking to further education specialists but I am interested in wider views before proceeding.
Ideally I would like to offer a simple IT accreditation of some kind soon after taking on a volunteer to let them prove themselves and once enough experience is gained offer a qualification that would help achieve employment.

Any suggestions welcome.

 

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hi ste
what i would suggest is if you train the younger ones well then the A+ cert would be the first step for them as this shows an emploeyr that they will have experiance in the understanding of a computer and the basic funtions of both hardware and software you could also seek the gouverment to help with funding for the tests as you can do the training so if keeps the costs low on youre behalf. or look into NVQ level what is lower level which isnt telling an employer much but dose not consist of alot of work the NVQ level is basically telling the employer that the person knows how to use office (excell,word processing etc...) which kids are learning in school already so i hope this helps but as a sugestion the A+ can consit of alot of work but can achive alot of work for the student. even thought it isnt as big as a cisco or a microsoft cert but it is an achievement none the less hope this helps

 

Thanks for the feedback
That’s kind of what I was thinking. As one of the biggest perceived issues will be how to guarantee quality, the A+ cert might help volunteers prove themselves at a reasonably early stage.

Steve

 

You could probably do with teaching them a lot more than IT certifications. So soft skills, interview techniques, the CORRECT way to lay out a Cv (not the way the bloody Schools and Universities tell you) and so on.

 

I agree. If I run a pilot scheme I will be liasing with Local Government colleagues and other agencies who specialise in helping people into employment. We can also get input from some national and regional ICT partners that we work worth regularly.

Steve