Are we inspiring our young people?

I have seen a few Linkedin posts lately about the importance of employer engagement with young people and I couldn’t agree more.

 Lizzie Brock from RMP Enterprise shared some stats about the importance of employers interactions with year 11’s

Their interactions resulted in

Changes in attitudes – 7% changed their future plans. 20-28% reflected on their choices

Motivation to study harder – Average 9% increase in weekly revision hours

Improved GCSE attainment – The equivalent of 1 student in 25 beating their predictions by one grade

Lower achievers and less advantaged learners responded best to the intervention.

 I talk from personal experience. My nephew did work experience last year. He was lucky. At that time I worked as Early in Career Programme Manager at Microsoft and was able to arrange for him to spend a week with different interns and apprentices so that he could get an idea of different areas of the business from different perspectives. Most importantly the perspective of those, like him who recently had to make decisions about their future. Most of his friends were not so lucky, they didn’t have an aunt who worked in an exciting, market leading tech company. 

My nephew lives in a rural village in East Anglia, most of his friends did their work experience in a fish and chip shop on the pier or a shoe shop in the local town. At best if they had parents who worked in a school they could go there and be a teacher’s assistant for a week, or shadow their mum or dad in their office. It is not just in the country that this is happening my step mother helps out at a food bank in Surrey and was contacted by a headmaster friend of hers asking if they could take two students who were unable to secure work experience. Whilst I am sure they gained some valuable skills such as customer service and time management I doubt it inspired and excited any of them.

Microsoft, and their amazing interns and apprentices opened my nephew’s eyes to new possibilities, it showed him that work can be exciting, interesting and challenging and doesn’t have to be a chore that allows you to pay your bills. He would probably never have considered an apprenticeship if he hadn’t seen them in action and heard from apprentice’s own mouths about how amazing their apprenticeship is, he has just accepted a role on a four year engineering apprenticeship and I couldn’t be prouder.

In the event of the new apprentice programmes that many companies are now offering, social mobility is getting better but if we don’t reach young people before they need to make decisions about their career aren’t we failing them? Once they get to university it is too late, they have already decided to go down the degree route and chosen their subjects. Good work experience opportunities are vital to inspire and educate our young people and show them what is available out there for them and it should not be about who you know.

I am not na?ve enough to think there is a quick fix to this problem. Schools don’t have the money to pay for career coaches who  have links with businesses and knowledge of the breadth of jobs out there, and even if they did those in rural areas do not have big businesses on their doorstep that they can easily travel to.

I am not sure there is an answer to the mobility issue, if you don’t have a friend or family member you can stay with you only have what is available in your area.

Some companies have fantastic work experience programmes that are structured and allow the students to get a real feel for the company, but how accessible are they? We need more in as many places and industries as possible.

If anyone has any ideas I would love to hear them. If I can get involved in any projects anyone is working on please let me know.

If I know of one person who had their life changed by their amazing work experience opportunity how many others could there be?