Chris Yiannakou is the Director of Business Partnerships at Lambeth College.

Danni Christie from The Southwark News chose the event to promote their new '250-in-100' campaign.

Step-Ahead and Lambeth College have come together to offer a Pre-Employment Training Programme to help local residents back into work.

Apprenticeships allow people to earn while they learn.

To celebrate Apprenticeship Week, Lambeth College’s Business Development Unit hosted a special event to recognise and thank employers who have been working closely with teams from our Faculty of Technology to increase the number of apprentices studying at the College.

Influential key speakers included Lambeth Council's Deputy Cabinet Member for Employment and Enterprise, Councillor Sally Prentice, David Edmunds from Eurocom Ltd and Janine O’Connor, Apprenticeship Project Manager from recruitment specialists Step Ahead.

Janine gave a presentation outlining the many benefits of collaborative partnerships like the Pre-Employment Training Programme offered by Step Ahead and Lambeth College. She said: “These programmes offer real work experience and qualification opportunities to the unemployed that will help them develop interviewing and presentation skills essential to the job-finding process”.

Other guests who braved the arctic conditions to attend the event included representatives from Lambeth Council, the National Apprenticeship Service and Southwark News. Danni Christie, Recruitment and Advertising Manager at Southwark News, chose this event to promote their new '250 in 100' campaign to promote work experience placements for Lambeth's young people to the borough's business community.

The '250 in 100' campaign follows on from the hugely successful Southwark News ‘100 in 100’ campaign which last year achieved the monumental target of finding 100 local employers to pledge 100 apprenticeship places within 100 days. This campaign was sponsored by Lambeth College and we are looking forward to working with Southwark News again to support their work-experience initiatives.

Chris Yiannakou, Director of Business Partnerships at Lambeth College, closed the event by thanking all who attended and inviting everyone to network in the College’s modern Sixth Form Café atrium. Catering for the evening was supplied by the College's own Healthy Gourmet Cafe.

Related item - Apprenticeships and Pre-Apprenticeships at Lambeth College

Related news story - Ministers take positive steps at Lambeth College (Sept 2011)