During the Easter holidays before our 6th year school exams, we had the opportunity to participate in the STGA’s Yellow Badge Tourist Guide training course. Our training for was sponsored by BID4Oban as part of its commitment to The Year of the Young Person. This was a unique and rewarding experience for us. It was far more challenging than we expected and gave us a real sense of achievement when we passed the exam.
The course itself was an intensive 6-day training programme. We realised that we knew very little about the area we had grown up in; yet this opportunity pushed us to research Oban’s history, culture and stories in a way that we would not have been motivated to do otherwise. This aspect of the course was most rewarding as it sparked an interest in Scottish history and led us to carry out more research for our own general knowledge.