D2 Grads Take Part in North West APM Challenge

The Association for Project Management (APM) Challenge is an annual competition that focuses on developing project management competence for those with less than three years’ experience in the industry, whilst also contributing to the wider community. This provided a great opportunity for our graduates to get involved with local charity Manchester Young Lives to design, manage and deliver a project of their own.

Manchester Young Lives Values & Impact. D2 Values & Impact

The transition from education into work can be challenging. You need relevant experience to talk about and practical examples of key employability skills and how they’ve equipped you for the world of work. The question that many young people are asking is this: How can you talk about your experience without any experience? Having been through the transition from education into work themselves, this area seemed like one the team could provide real value in. By leveraging their experience from interviews and assessment days, the team were able to design an interactive workshop focused on building up soft skills, interview techniques and goal setting. The practical nature of the workshops provided real world experience that the young people from Manchester Young Lives could reference in interviews and future endeavours as well as developing their confidence contributing to tasks in a team setting.

The two workshops were delivered at Manchester Young Lives centres Ardwick & Wythenshawe on the 27th March 2025. The day started and ended with a self-assessment from participants to measure competency improvement and multiple group tasks throughout the day that directly contributed to these competencies. The practical group tasks consisted of a creative icebreaker, a persuasion and discussion task, a team LEGO building exercise, best practice interview answers and S.M.A.R.T objective setting. To compliment the tasks and to deliver longer-term benefit, the team produced a resource booklet that highlighted key employability skills that participants had used throughout the workshop and how they could now appropriately reference them, an interview question answer model with best practice examples, a S.M.A.R.T help sheet with best practice examples and a goal visualisation model. The LEGO used for the workshop was also provided with example structures so tasks could be repeated in the future.

The team received nothing but positive feedback from participants and staff at Manchester Young Lives and after an extremely rewarding process, the team will be recommending the challenge to future D2 graduates.