The Wigan careers event that belongs on your family list

I keep a list on my phone of things to do with the kids around Wigan. Soft play, the odd theatre trip, a walk along the canal when the weather behaves itself. This week I have added something that would not normally get near that list: a chance to meet employers, ask questions and explore different possibilities.

That is the sum of what Wigan Today has reported. The headline promises exactly that and no more, so I am not going to pad it out with details I do not have. If you want the specifics, the venue, the timings, who will actually be in the room, read the piece and follow it up. What I want to write about is why a jobs event ends up on a dad's family list at all.

Kids do not know what jobs exist

My two can name a footballer, a teacher and whatever job their mum does that week. Ask them what a quantity surveyor does, or a planner, or someone who runs a warehouse shift, and you get a shrug. That is not a failure of ambition. It is a failure of exposure. They can only want a job they have actually seen.

A room full of employers in Wigan, with people who will answer a straight question, does more for that than any careers leaflet sent home in a book bag. It is the difference between reading about work and standing next to someone who does it every day.

The questions I would get them to ask

Not "what grades do I need". That comes later. The useful ones are boring and human. What does your day actually look like? What is the worst part of the job? Did you go to university, and would you bother again? How did you get in, and who helped you?

Also worth reading: Jack and the Beanstalk at Blackpool Grand Theatre: dates, cast and how to book

Those questions get honest answers. And honestly, I learn something from them too. I have spent enough of my working life in recruitment to know that most people end up doing something they never planned at sixteen.

Supporting Wigan means showing up

I bang on about buying local and using what is on the doorstep, and then I have to actually do it. Turning up to something like this is part of that. Employers who make the effort to be in a room in Wigan deserve people in the room with them, and our kids deserve to see that this town is somewhere you can build a life, not just somewhere you leave from.

It is also free, it is indoors, and it beats another hour in a soft play where I pay for a coffee I do not want while someone's birthday party screams past me. That is my kind of family activity: cheap, local and quietly useful.

Check the details before you go

One honest note. I am going off a headline here, and headlines are not listings. Before you promise the kids a day out, open the original article and get the times, the place and whether it is the sort of thing that suits a curious fourteen year old or a nine year old who just wants the free pens.

I will be the bloke in the corner asking the awkward question about pay. Come and say hello if you spot me.