Year 11 VCAL Upskilling

This year in VCAL we have completed an assortment of upskilling including a Barista course, Safe Food Handling certification, practicing yoga and improving our cooking skills in Cooking for Life. All of these courses have been extremely beneficial to us and we have obtained many skills not only to help make us employable, but also useful for our personal lives. Upskilling is part of our Applied Learning program with Bu Allan.

The Barista course has shown us not only how to make exceptional coffees but also how to work swiftly and efficiently with others in crowded spaces and under time constraints.

Safe food handling is essential for those who want to work in any environment with food and is also just useful to have for a lot of situations, like if we want to help out in our local footy club canteen.

Practicing yoga has assisted us in learning exercises that can help our mental wellbeing and achieve an inner peace. It helps us deal with the stresses of life and have some time for ourselves.

Cooking in life has shown us simple recipes that we can use in everyday life and it also tastes good! They have been easy to do and help keep organised when things might get really busy.

Over the past two weeks we have obtained our Level 2 First Aid qualification, including CPR. This means that we now have a number of qualifications for our resume.

We’ve had a wonderful year so far in VCAL and have acquired many skills from many sources. We are grateful to all of the providers – Ms Shaw (yoga), Leeanne Irving (cooking for life) Craig and Boxhill Institute to TAFE (Barista and Safe Food Handling), and also to Jess from Intelligent Training Solutions for our First Aid Training.

Georgia Mantzaris