Member Article

Student sitting pretty after solving weighty problem

A Washington school boy has found himself in the driving seat after winning a challenge as part of a major North East initiative.

Cameron Revell of Washington School was one of 800 young people who attended the opening day of Work Discovery Week at the Stadium of Light last week.

As part of a whole host of activities taking place as part of the event’s career fair, students were asked to guess the weight of a car seat produced by the Lear Corporation for Nissan.

Cameron (15) guessed 20 kg – the closest to the actual 22kg weight of the front driver’s seat from the new Nissan Qashqai -winning a £50 iTunes voucher from the company.

Alison Burgin, Senior HR officer from Rainton Bridge-based Lear and plant manager Jim Casey turned up at the Spout Lane School during assembly to hand over the prize to the teenager.

“Lear is delighted, for the second year running, to have supported Work Discovery Week, which is a great and important way of informing young people about career opportunities that are within our region and to help prepare them for their working lives,” said Mr Casey.

“As well as the need for us to perform accurate calculations within our working lives, there’ll be many times where we’ll need to estimate as accurately as possible. This competition was a simple example to test estimation skills and the winner demonstrated his skill by accurately estimating the weight of a car seat.”

The careers fair was just one event during the packed programme which made up Work Discovery Week, including visits to businesses across the region, workshops, a city bus tour and a business problem solving challenge. Work Discovery Week has now run successfully for two years, with plans to repeat it again in 2015.

The week is an initiative from Sunderland’s Economic Leadership Board – Business:Schools Task Group who recognised the need to forge stronger links between companies across the region and school pupils on Sunderland.

A number of the region’s top businesses supported this year’s event including Nissan, catering giants Bidvest 3663, Arriva, Gentoo, University of Sunderland and Sunderland College with additional support from The Bridges, Accenture, Liebherr Works, Calsonic Kansei, Northumbrian Water, The Marriott Sunderland and TRW. SAFC, Sunderland City Council and NECC are also key partners in Work Discovery Week.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Sorted PR .