She’s been dubbed the ‘Mentor on the move’ our Trainer Pam Gum is proving invaluable to those students who need a little extra support and guidance with assessments or tasks.
Pam will go anywhere to hold mentoring sessions, usually setting up a base for three days. “I’ve set up meetings at hotels, I’ve used my sister’s house in Melbourne and we’ve even set up base in a church too”.
She explains “I like to think I’ve made these sessions as accessible as possible but at the end of the day you can bring a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. One student Ehud Taashur was so keen to participate he spent four hours each day travelling to and from the venue in Brisbane.”
Pam outlines that it really is an open session. ‘There are no time slots, people can turn up when they like. They can bounce ideas off each other and consult with one another about tricky assessments’.
One student who cannot thank Pam enough is 34-year-old Jonathon Warren who was struggling completing his Diploma of Business Administration.
The single dad and security guard from Mooroolbark near Melbourne says “I’d been working on this course for 12 months and had hit a brick wall and couldn’t get on top of the last assessments, I just needed to sit down with someone who could help me and to able to meet Pam was the answer to my problems”.
Jonathon adds ” I’d simply bitten off more than I could chew, I was holding down a full-time job, being a father and trying to study. I just needed the motivation to get it completed”.
He went to the Melbourne sessions for two days. “I even brought my two 5-year-old twins on Saturday, and they received the same warm welcome”. With Pam’s help, he managed to finish the diploma and is now waiting on the results. “It was just fantastic, a very positive experience.”
Students Karen Watkins and Clara Hill sat next to each other at her session in Melbourne. As Pam explains “They discovered they lived just a stone’s throw away from each other, became good friends and now they’ve come to an arrangement where they meet on a weekly basis and have developed their own support network”.
There’s no specific type of student who benefits from these sessions “One woman in her early twenties, didn’t say a great deal and I kept encouraging her to speak out and I was worried she wasn’t getting much out of the sessions but she slowly blossomed and when she left she gave me two large Easter eggs to say thanks. It’s these sorts of things which make my job very worthwhile”.
It’s been such a success that Pam hopes to do more of these mobile mentoring sessions. If you’d like a training session to be arranged in an area near you, let us know. Here at TrainSmart Australia, we offer a variety of diploma courses approved by industry bodies, for example Diploma of Project Management or Diploma of Human Resource Management and Accounting. Call us now to find out more.
