Our Year 10 and Year 11 Spanish learners visited the Bouygues site at Canning Town, to prepare for their Theme 3 questions on Education Post 16, and jobs, career choices and ambitions and also to find out about the various different roles within the construction industry.

Bouygues is a French company but their current workforce at Canning Town hosts a huge number of nationalities and languages. We were welcomed by Paula Arkell-Waller who speaks French, German and Italian and by her colleagues from different departments who speak Spanish and Portuguese. Learners were able to use questions that they had prepared in advance to find out more about how languages are used within the industry and how Paula and her team ended up working in construction.

Examples of the questions asked were ¿Que asignatura estudiaste a la Universidad? ¿Que opinas sobre la Universidad? ¿ Crees que es importante aprender otras lenguas? 
¿Utilizas otras lenguas en tu trabajo ahora? ¿Como es la plata? This last question was very important for some of our learners as it’s relating to pay!

Learners were also able to use their translation skills, particularly our Portuguese speakers who had to translate instantaneously for those that didn’t understand Portuguese. We also found out more about the different careers in the construction industry eg contable, abogado/a, arqhuitecto/a ingeniero/a, enfermero/a, conductor/a, fontanero/a and the words that in some languages didn’t automatically translate for example Quantity Surveyor!  

Huge thanks to Paula and her team for allowing us to visit the site and we look forward to doing something similar with our learners in the future.