SPEAKER_00 0:00

Two in three young people leave school with no work experience at the moment. And even at age 13, which is the one that stood out for me, one in three is already stressed about what their future career is. Some students you have amazing parental networks, alumni networks they can draw upon, and you've got students who have no careers advisor in their school to draw upon. So we're now the UK's largest provider of virtual work experience. So we have about one and a half million students on the platform.

SPEAKER_02 0:24

The future of early careers is exciting. Hello and welcome to the Talent Download podcast. I'm Darren Lancaster and I'm the CEO of Amberjack. I hope you're really gonna enjoy today's episode. It's got a really great topic. Um we're joined today by Sam Hines and he's from Spring Pod. Um and we're gonna really get into young people uh in the workplace. Amberjack and Spring Pod have been working on quite a sophisticated report, which we've actually done for the last three years, and we want to talk to you about that report. Um and it's really looking at the Gen Z careers and what what basically happens um to individuals in the workplace. It's quite topical at the moment at the moment. Young people in the workplace, as we know, specifically within the UK, there's such a high proportion uh of people entering, coming out of education that don't actually have uh an employment. And as I've spoken to many times in this podcast, I've got the five kids, uh, and it worries me quite a lot kind of what that future will be. So I hope you're gonna enjoy today. Um, welcome, Sam. Thank you. I hope you're gonna enjoy today's discussion with us. Probably great to just give the audience uh just a little bit of an intro on yourself.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I'm uh Sam Himes, the CEO at Spring Pod. Um so started the organization 10 years ago now. Um, my sort of background before that. So I studied uh mechanical engineering at university because I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do in my future, it sort of led Leeds into this. Um, did various jobs um uh after that had always wanted to start my own thing, um, started a part-time student jobs website, taught myself to code very badly, tried to run that, um, and then started Spring Pods um really with the view that uh one of the sort of uh biggest challenges that I thought I'd experienced that I saw was quite commonplace was careers advice for young people is awful as a whole. Everyone's got their own uh sort of story about what they maybe were told they should do with their future while they're at school and why that didn't fit them. Um, and wanted to try and find a way to democratize access to opportunity. So, how do you enable every young person to have the same opportunities to gain experience with the world's best employers and universities while they're in that secondary school journey? Um so that was sort of where we started 10 years ago.

SPEAKER_02 2:39

Yeah. And so what so for people, what does actually Spring Pod do? What's its kind of purpose and what and what's the services that it's performing?

SPEAKER_00 2:45

Yeah, absolutely. So we um so we're now the UK's largest provider of virtual work experience. Um so we have about one and a half million students on the platform. Um we work with about 150 or so enterprise employers, um, sort of corporates, yeah, household names, uh, sort of Amazon Airbus through to Vodafone and in between. Um what we do is we build um virtual career experiences that are anywhere from one hour, uh short introduction to a career through a day-in-the-life career simulation, um, all the way through to 40-hour micro-internships, which are really deep uh learning experiences, uh, real-world employer challenges. We do we build everything in-house, um, obviously in partnership with the employer uh that we're working with, and then we release that onto our platform um for our uh students to engage with um across the UK and now globally as well.

SPEAKER_02 3:33

And um I get I guess it's there needs to be quite a big sort of mission ultimately in doing that and actually coming up with that idea um to help people around it. And and well done you on kind of coming up with that idea. Was the initial stages it hard to get engagement from the employers or were they quite uh do you know what we actually started more like a careers information platform?

SPEAKER_00 3:56

So if you're familiar with uh the Unifrogs, uh UCAS, those sort of platforms where it's all about um reading about a career, reading about an employer. Um, but we quickly found that information or lack of information isn't the issue for young people, it's lack of access to experience. And so we were, we probably had a couple of hundred thousand students on the platform when the pandemic hit. And the most popular area of the platform was listing in-person work experience. That dropped off a cliff overnight, and so we were thinking, how can we recreate that in a virtual setting to the highest quality benchmark we possibly can? And thankfully that sort of stuck around as a solution. Um, but I think when you look at the you know, the numbers and sort of the driver for this uh for us as a as a team is two in three young people leave school with no work experience at the moment. Um so for all the you know brilliant government ambition to uh give every young person work experience and youth guarantee and all these really uh sort of laudable ambitions, the supply and demand just doesn't match up for us. So you've got to have a scalable solution that can work in parallel with in-person, but can reach students at scale and remove all the barriers that in-person has with cost, with geography, um, with access through networks, etc. Um, so that's really where we where we sit.

SPEAKER_02 5:11

I was it was interesting you say that in terms of um trying to give people experience and work experience for young people. So uh both my boys, one of them just came out of university, one's one's in university at the moment. Um, when we were looking at their um degrees, we obviously got the option where you can take a degree, you can do a placement year within that degree. And I was a little bit skeptical because I was kind of traditional, I'd sort of the three types I'd done the three years of university and then sort of come out type role. And I was like, okay, how's this definitely going to work? It may be another year that you're potentially delaying kind of in full time, and how do you then come back in the workplace? But my experiences have been something completely difficult. Yes, it was, you know, you had to work hard to find that placement and and get that. But once you're in that work experience, I've got um Isaac's uh just done a financial accounting firm, he's just done the place to go back to the Loughborough uh now. Fantastic, done really, really well with them. They've offered him a job for when he comes out, you know, fantastic, straight in. Exactly the same with Joseph. So Joseph did exactly the same placement he did with the NHS, exactly. They came out and they did it. And I think to myself, you know, that's to a certain extent, there's it's almost following more like the German kind of scheme in terms of really getting that work experience, not in its entirety, but for getting that work experience, getting in there and that connection with the workplace that means you don't just come out of university and then then kind of just think, what am I gonna do?

SPEAKER_00 6:30

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And there's a uh sort of supply and demand or scale piece to it. So, you know, if you take um Airbus, we work with them for five or six years. Um, before we started working together, they took about 100, 120 students on in-person work experience every year. Brilliant scheme, but uh restricted to the Southwest, to Wales, where their bases are, um, quite undiverse local uh populations, etc. And so how could they scale that from 100? We now put over 10,000 young people through the Airbus program every year, all over the UK, all backgrounds, um, and obviously the virtual, you can't gain all the benefits of in-person. We you want students to have both, but why can't a young person do 10 virtual experiences with the world best employers while they're in school and then pick the in-person placement that uh suits them best based on everything they've learned for that? Um, and also opening up the these corporates who have such limited access. You know, talk about the NHS. Um, we work with about 60 NHS trusts and sort of ICBs across the UK because there's so many challenges of bringing a young person into a hospital setting that you put that in a virtual setting, you obviously remove a lot of that. So there's there's different uh sort of benefits to it to it as well.

SPEAKER_02 7:40

I've got to ask, what was the inspiration to start the business? Where did it come from?

SPEAKER_00 7:44

It was um it was mostly around uh sort of careers advice and the um the sort of disparity I saw between access for young people. Um you have uh some students you have amazing uh parental networks, alumni networks they can draw upon, and you've got students who have no careers advisor in their school um to draw upon. So it's how do you just remove that and use technology at that time was you've got tech now, can't you just connect the student directly with with the employer? So that was the uh sort of naive starting point that we we started with. But um yes, now scaling, so we have over half a million enrollments a year in the programs um with those employees.

SPEAKER_02 8:22

And why do you why do you think you know we were talking about the UK having you know a specific problem, you know, compared to other countries? I think I think Germany's down to like nine percent, it was not ideal, but you know, it's better than being up the high teams that we're currently operating at. What's what's what's the problem in your eyes? Because you're you're you're working that it you're you can see it, you know, firsthand. What's the problem with with the system? Where do you start?

SPEAKER_00 8:46

Um I think one of the the major things is um so if you think about it from an employer's perspective, you're if you're an SME, what are the incentives to bring a 15, 16-year-old into your organization? It's a lot of hassle um to do. You have to think about tasks to give them, you have to take your colleagues' time to um you know sort of um make sure they're they're being looked after throughout the week, etc. So there's a lot of overheads to it, and there's no incentives. So, you know, is there an opportunity in our mind to maybe think about the apprenticeship levy? Could you put that towards work experience or shorter format experiences in the workplace? And so I think some of it's sort of structural and there's some really interesting policy changes you can make around it. And then I think some of it's also um uh giving employers more flexibility where offering work experience doesn't just mean a whole week for one student, one-to-one. So you can there's a whole range there, you know, with sort of what Spring Pod does at the fully virtual end of the spectrum, but you could do uh hybrid where you do virtual for four days, but then have an in-person event where the students come in and present the project they've been working on. You can do mentoring hybrids, and so I think it's possibly just giving more off-the-shelf uh solutions that employers can draw upon much more easily than having to build everything themselves from scratch.

SPEAKER_02 10:03

And and through your experience, you you work with thousands of young people kind of coming through and seeing it's all real life. What have you what have you seen? Uh how have you seen it make a difference, I guess, for those people, kind of on their decision making, yeah, yeah, how they kind of approach work or think about where they want to go and what they want to do?

SPEAKER_00 10:21

So we um we look at everything from uh sort of student uh feedback surveys in effect uh through to the actual destination outcomes. So we track their long-term outcomes where they end up. Um but the things we optimise our programs for, there's really two sort of North stars we're looking at is uh has the program increased their awareness and understanding of that career, that industry, that employer? Uh and secondly, has it increased their confidence about finding a job in the future? And that's really the one we care more about. But on both of them, across all of those enrolments, um, roughly half of the young people that enroll tell us they're uh they don't have a good awareness and don't understand the career before they start the program. After that one experience, that goes up to 99%. Um, and then on the confidence side, sort of quite worryingly, one in two young people tell us they're not confident about finding a job in the future. Yeah. And 91% tell us they're confident or very confident afterwards. So that's sort of what we optimize initially and for, and then we track their destinations. So for um Amazon, we work with, uh we have about uh 30,000 young people go through that program a year. Uh, one in three end up in a tech role or on our tech university course out of that. Um, for Siemens, 78% go into an engineering role. So we have those sort of markers that we try and um optimize for as well.

SPEAKER_02 11:35

Yeah, I think you you touched on something that's really important. Um, and something I'm quite passionate about is the way in which the market uh and particularly the press has tried to really sensationalise uh what's actually happening in the crew early careers marketplace and really telling young people there is no kind of career AI is gonna wipe out your job. Yeah. Um, you know, you need to think about things differently. Yes, you do need to think about things slightly differently, but the reality is is and of the job data is isn't actually associated to uh AI is gonna wipe out your job. Um, it's the reality is we've been in a really quite challenging economic space at the moment, and that's naturally going to have an effect on all jobs and not just necessarily early careers job. And the real effect based around AI isn't isn't actually coming to transpire. You're you're basically seeing men's Nor Men's E so you're seeing um PWC, EY, Grant Thornton, all upping basically their grad intakes, but they're just shaping it differently, they're just thinking the way in which they think about it differently, which is important. You know, luckily, sometimes a couple of my kids, one wants to be gross, wants to be a dancer, down at dance college, gonna follow that passion. She's probably got the one job that AI can't touch in all reality. Maybe robots can one day, but she can't touch. Uh, and Oliver wants to be a pilot, always wanted to be a pilot. Like he's only he's only 13, but he's always wanted to do that. Um, and I think he always will. We always have that passion. And my reality is there's always gonna be a pilot, I think, always in that cockpit. It doesn't matter what technology um can do. So there's many young people that don't really know, though, often Josie Wyis that didn't really know what they wanted to do. Yeah, and there's so many young people that come out uh huge amount of yeah, yeah, and but that's your sort of media point.

SPEAKER_00 13:17

I think there's a huge amount the media has to answer for if you look at the the survey, um, the uh level of stress amongst the young people surveys is the thing that really stood out for me. So if you look at uh by the time you look at 18, 19 year olds, 80% are uh stressed about their future career. And even at age 13, which was the one that stood out for me, one in three is already stressed about what their future career is. I don't know about you, but at age 13, I wasn't thinking about my future career. I still still did my paper. Yeah, that's gonna work. Um but but I think that's um it's not just um you know the AI uh sort of skills and the uh job apocalypse and all of these sort of media terms. Um it's also uh all of them uh you know truth about uh cost of living as well. So that's another factor that's feeding into uh this uh just level of worry and concern um amongst younger people. I think that's really why you're seeing the other data's showing that because of that, students are starting to think about their career at younger at a younger and younger age every year. And that's the trend we've seen over the last uh three years. Um so even engaging before the start of secondary school is now quite sensible for a lot of employers to start shaping that and supporting students um so they can just feel more confident and positive.

SPEAKER_02 14:34

Do you uh what are the barriers that are in place to kind of do that? Is it is there is there blocks, is it in the education system, is it government-led, is it, is it employer-led? Is we're with where are we how are we blocking it?

SPEAKER_00 14:46

There's a bit on all sides, obviously. Um, I think schools are typically desperate for employer engagement. They're now measured on uh employer engagement much more heavily than they used to be, um, sort of from an offstead perspective for for the Gatsby benchmarks um and other sort of markers like that as well. Um for employers, it's your uh what's always existed, I guess, with unless you go school by school and do careers fairs or talks or mentoring, um, you need a big team to do that. It's a lot of investment. Um, so what are the other solutions, either hybrid or virtual or both, um, that could make that just a bit easier um for them.

SPEAKER_02 15:22

And what what can employers do? What should they be thinking about to make it better?

SPEAKER_00 15:26

Um they should definitely be thinking about uh how they present careers. Um so again, the the data in the report, I think it's 82% of young people want careers presented realistically. So they want authenticity. You know, it's the same as the uh sort of you know TikTok generation, they want authenticity in how things are communicated to them. Um so the sort of uh marketing polish applied to to career roles um just isn't as effective as it um maybe once was. Um so I think that's the sort of um first suggestion is just it's gotta be honest. Um 50% of students uh care most about salary, um, or 50% said that was the number one um concern, as you'd probably expect, especially with cost of living, etc. So if you can put that up front um and also present the role uh with its sort of warts and all as well. So I think that's possibly one of the reasons you see quite a high churn rate in with apprentices in particular, is the feedback we get from our employers is a lot of the young people turn up and the role's different from what they were sold. Yeah. Um and it obviously, you know, there's doesn't help anyone in that case. The employer has lost a load of uh investment that they've put into that uh recruit, they've got to go back out to market. So if you can do that up front by giving them a bit of a day-in-the-life simulation or however you get get that across before they hit the apply button, then it should um should surf both sides.

SPEAKER_02 16:50

Yeah, good. Let's get on to the report. So the Gen Z report. We've been working with you for the last three years um basically to put it together. Um, I guess it the pulse of what it's taking is is really looking at young people um and the way in which they're feeling what's what's happening in the world. Why do you feel that's so important to kind of continue doing that and putting that time into it?

SPEAKER_00 17:12

I think part of it's the trend over time, so just seeing how that's shifting year to year. Um, but part of it's also just the pace of change at the moment. You know, I don't think it's ever been as fast as it possibly is now. Um, so I think keeping on top of that uh from the young people's perspective, uh, in particular, with all of those media headlines is is the main thing we want to take from this. Like what's what's really uh concerning them, where are the blockers? Is it the AI skills that they're focusing on? Is it cost of living? Is it other aspects? So that's really what we want to look at is the trend over time and how it's changing.

SPEAKER_02 17:42

And what surprised you from the report? What stood out?

SPEAKER_00 17:46

Um I think it's that that level of stress is the maybe it's not surprising, which is a bit concerning, but the I guess the um the fact that it's from such a young age, um, so it's impacting students so much earlier. Um and I think we have seen trends of employers wanting to and proactively trying to engage a younger and younger age, but that their message is pretty clear, it's got to be from the start of secondary school, if not earlier, um, to really impact that. And obviously that flows it through into subject choices as well at GCSE or whatever route the young person has taken, um, and with uh apprenticeships as well, uh so 50% roughly in the report, um, so that they didn't have good advice around apprenticeships. Um, so so there's a big gap there to make up.

SPEAKER_02 18:30

Yeah, true. And um was there when you you kind of thought about it and the pressures, um, the career pressures that are basically there for the individuals. Was there things that were coming out of the report that basically sort of suggested that around it? I think you talked about it a little bit earlier in terms of the stresses and the strains regarding it. Was that is that what it was highlighting?

SPEAKER_00 18:53

Yeah, the cost of living in particular. Um 67% now concerned about that as their number one. Um, I think that's up from 60%, I think it was in the last report. Um, AI skills definitely. Um but I think my personal opinion on on AI is we can we can apply a really positive sort of view to that compared to the the media. Um so if you think about this this generation is the is going to be the most AI literate of any generation, of course. Um so can you harness that by actually presenting them as much more employable? So they've got the AI native skills in effect, and you can develop those really uh hopefully with limited uh sort of effort. What they're missing is the business context. So can you help them understand? I know how to use you know, Claude or whatever the tool is, how do I apply that to a CRM? I don't even know what a CRM is and how it's used in a business. So what we're trying to do is is bring that in. So our microinternships are uh combining AI training with building an actual artifact. So you can select a, I want to do the Jaguar Land Rover challenge or the Rolls-Royce challenge, um, and then apply AI uh skills to that, and you end up with a vibe-coded tool or a piece of data analysis, something that you can actually show to an employer when you're in that application process. Um so that's how we're hopefully gonna uh sort of to uh sort of move the needle a little bit on that. Um, and also from an S SME's perspective, if you think about uh an 18-year-old approaching a small company and saying, I've I've looked at your B2B website, I've rebuilt it with vibe coding. Yeah, here it is. Do you want to hire me? Yeah, like can we can we try and get to that sort of place? Yeah, that's what you're saying. It's all it's all possible now. It's just sort of maybe putting it in a bit more positive spin.

SPEAKER_02 20:37

Yeah. I think that's uh one of the reasons I I've spoken a little bit about it on previous episodes of the podcast, but at Amberjack, we we saw this gap around assessment, which was everything was about in assessment or or judging the individual, was about trying to protect that individual from actually using an AI products to basically influence it. And we were just thinking, but that's just not true. You know, in the workplace, everybody's got a clawed or alternative with ChatGPT working alongside them to help them, even if the company doesn't authorize it, they're using it on their phone, they're doing different ways to kind of get around that. Yeah, and in actual fact, the most important part is to try and understand the capability of the individual to basically use AI in assessments. We've basically created a whole um case study where basically a candidate goes in, sees so much information, couldn't possibly do it as a human and kind of digest all of that information, but basically needs to use a large language model within that process to prompt, to iterate, to kind of come up with decisions. And then we kind of overlay that um with our own um assessment product um to basically look at future potential um to actually work out the conclusion around that. And I think if you layer that and think about it logically to the same sort of way in which um Springpot are thinking, that really gives you better intel really around what the individuals of the future are going to be. And there's there's plenty of books that kind of sort of back that. Up in terms of way in which we're going to work. And I think that the reality is that's what we're going to be. Yes, things are going to get changed, things are going to progress, things are going to move. But the reality is the human being is still going to be here. And basically, but we're going to utilize these tools more and more to help the productivity of us.

SPEAKER_00 22:16

Yeah. And I guess it's so I guess that tool is focused primarily on the um the way the individual thinks about the problem. It's not about that AI output that they're able to generate at the end. Because that can obviously be uh you know gamified to some extent. Um, but the way, as you suggest, I guess it's the uh how they think through the problem, their critical thinking skills. Absolutely. Um, which is all what the employers are sort of desperate to identify, obviously, as well. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:40

You talked about um the cost of living crisis that's happening, really affecting um people quite desperately in certain places.

SPEAKER_00 22:47

Do you think that's changing sort of young people's sort of outlook in terms of what they now want from a career or or diff Yeah, it's it's definitely even further increasing the focus on sort of the monetary benefits, the salary uh information going up and up in terms of the ranking of what they care about. Um, I think there's also um certain demographics of young people, obviously, that it hits even harder. And so if you look at the report, um, Young Care is is one of the groups that um uh are even more affected by this from a level of confidence and a focus on cost of living, um, which you'd obviously I guess expect. Um but if you think about that that group, um one of the barriers frequently is asking that sort of young person with that background to go and dedicate a full week to an in-person uh you know placement and travel and when they've got caring responsibilities is a huge ask. So if you can apply some sort of model um that is more flexible so they can do it asynchronously, um, so that's why we have um uh just under 7% of our students uh self-identify as young carers, uh, which is about five times the national average.

SPEAKER_02 23:57

Wow, that's huge.

SPEAKER_00 23:58

Yeah, so so if you if you give them something where they can just dip in for an hour and keep progressing towards that uh sort of experience, that's um it's got a lot of different sort of use cases for different types of students as well.

SPEAKER_02 24:08

And is that the biggest area you see the inequalities sort of exist around carers, is it, or is there other places?

SPEAKER_00 24:14

Definitely carers, uh young carers and um uh sort of disadvantaged students of free school mere recipients as well. Um so cost of travel as a barrier for in-person as well is obviously something you can remove uh with hybrid or or virtual. Um so those are probably the two biggest ones, and then obviously geography. If you're a student in a you know a rural location, your chances of getting a placement at one of the big four in you know in one of the big cities is um how do you open that access up so it doesn't matter where you live, yeah, um as well.

SPEAKER_02 24:45

Yeah, I mean I I remember many years ago I I met someone who actually became a reporter in the BBC, um but was a was a a carer, um was so was very much on you know, every penny kind of mattered. Yeah, and that ability to kind of whether it was to go to an interview or to do those types of things was really hard and really difficult in terms of actually being able to do that, and you know, and to see their then success of what they actually then became is quite inspiring, really, to actually get through all of that.

SPEAKER_00 25:17

I think there's so many people out there, and I think that confidence piece is is another bit. So um it takes quite a lot of confidence to put yourself forwards for an in-person uh uh experience if you don't think you're gonna fit in or you're worried about that, whereas you can lower that barrier to entry if you put it in a virtual or hybrid setting, generate that confidence, build it up, and then progress that individual who's maybe from a uh you know minority background into those experiences. Um so that's sort of one of the other things we really try and focus on as well.

SPEAKER_02 25:49

So, how do um, in your view, how do young people who don't have a traditional network um of professionals? I'm I'm to a certain extent, my children are a little bit lucky because I've worked in recruitment pretty much in some one way or another, or staffing or talent um all my life and should effectively have quite a strong network, but not everyone's got that, and not everyone's got those parents that are connected. So, what should they be thinking about? What should they be doing? Do you think?

SPEAKER_00 26:20

I think obviously um there's the school as a as a resource. So uh one of the positives I think out of the report was uh 90% of young people say they do have careers advice at school, but the majority is once a year or once a term, was sort of the frequency. Um and then the routes to advice was roughly 50%. So they had they asked their parents or guardians and was about 50%. 50% asked their teachers, and so sort of multi-select, and um 50% was their career advisor as well, which I guess is a little bit low. Yeah. If you think about that on its own, um, so I think those um there's loads of online um resources, obviously, including uh sort of Spring Pod, but there's loads of others as well. Um network on LinkedIn as well, I think is one of the uh the other pieces of advice that we always give, and we always uh help students create their LinkedIn account as part of their SpringPod experience, they can start building that network, connecting with the employers. Um, so I think that's probably the um the biggest thing. And then also just from a uh a stress and concern level. Uh, if you've got 80% of young people feeling stressed about that at age 18, like you're not alone. Everyone is is feeling that way. So um, yeah, that's probably the last bit.

SPEAKER_02 27:36

You talked about um technology improving kind of the outcomes um for people. We talked about, you know, we talked about that mobility problem of of people being able to get to places and do things uh at one time, teams and whatever um other systems can kind of help within that process. Is there any other technologies that are kind of helping you?

SPEAKER_00 27:57

Is it the way in which you're creating programs um for yeah, we're um we are definitely starting to integrate more AI into the way that we develop contents we can do it more at scale, and we're always going to have that um uh sort of manual start to the process. But there's obviously really cool stuff where you can do with gamification and bringing uh workplaces to life uh more easily as well. Uh, we're also we've got an AI-powered interview coach as well. Right. Um, so a young person could uh simulate an interview for a specific role at a specific employer, and it's it's not an assessment tool. Um, it's designed to be a safe space, they can practice their answers. Um, and the unique thing for us is it's plugged into their Springbot profile so it knows uh which experiences you've done, so it can give you coaching on that was a great answer for how you demonstrated your communication skills, but you might want to talk about this activity you did in this program in this way. So that's sort of one of the ways that we um we think tech can really support and also um remove the um uh the sort of differences for uh in terms of access for your some students at some schools will have loads of access to interview preparation, a lot of students will have none. Um so this can be that that sort of leveler for those students as well.

SPEAKER_02 29:10

Yeah, that's good. I think you you spoke about in the the last part of the discussion we talked about LinkedIn um and the way in which you represent them yourself, and that's great. Spring pod kind of offer that because I do I do see that in in young people, you know, the imagery that you put on your LinkedIn profile, the photo, the kind of just being quite, you know, straight, friendly looking and and being normal rather than kind of caricature faces or things like that, representing the experience that you do have, what you have done, you know, whether it's your elements of your work experience part-time or not, and the way in which you represent yourself, hugely important to an employer because they will be checking, they will be looking at these types of things to see how you're how you're providing. So, yeah, yeah, good bit of advice. So going back a little bit to the report, um, what do you think that young people will expect from employees over the next five years? Did it bring anything out that that kind of definitely that authenticity?

SPEAKER_00 30:06

Um, but we sort of talked about that already. I think another thing might be um uh sort of the impact of AI on the roles. So if you're a imagine you're a 13-year-old now and you're trying to figure out which career is uh sort of AI safe at the moment, where do you start?

SPEAKER_01 30:20

I'd say dancing, I'd say Grace has got it right, but who knows? So who knows whether I could be right, but yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:25

Yeah, um, so anything you can provide around around that is obviously one of their major worries. So if you can uh sort of help uh uh sort of them get confident around that area, that would that's uh definitely a newer area to focus on, I think, as well. Um and then uh I think access is the last bit, you know, it's it shouldn't be that difficult now with technology to give students more than we have been able to in the past in terms of access to your organization, whatever size you are. Um so I think that's whether that's uh a you know mentoring using technology, whether it's um uh workshops, whether it's a project-based learning, whether it's work experience, and there's a huge range that doesn't need a heavy lift necessarily to sort of uh stand it up. Um so I think that's probably advice of the employers.

SPEAKER_02 31:10

Yeah, I th I think it's is topic probably for another podcast at some point, but the uh one of the aspects is is also what the employer then does with the talent that they then take on from an AI perspective and the training and the development, the learning and coaching that they kind of give the individuals. I I I know I've seen organizations um elsewhere um doing things around it, but I do think it's it's a big area basically for organizations to grasp. You know, we we're talking about the way in which you're introducing it to try and help individuals, you know, shape some of the products and offerings that you give. I'm talking about it from an Amjack perspective of trying to look at the individual and shape the skills. Yeah, but it's and then you get in the organization, it's kind of then that next piece, isn't there, that kind of comes on.

SPEAKER_00 31:54

And it's different levels though, aren't they? There's the um uh sort of general transferable skills that employers are desperate to nurture in young people, so there's problem solving, critical thinking, teamwork, communication, etc., all of those that will never change. Um, some of them will become more important than others. Um, you've then got sort of the AI fluency that you're talking about with sort of from an amberjack perspective of how do you uh nurture and assess those. And then you get down into the specifics with AI tooling. So that's the bit that when we talk to employers and say, Do you want us to help train young people on the latest tools, AI tools or uh, you know, technical tools for a specific role? Say, no, don't go that far because we do that. Like we're really good at that when when uh young people turn up in our business. What we need you to do is help them uh gain the communication skills because they're falling down in an interview. They can't communicate with colleagues, they can't pick up the phone um frequently when they're coming into the workplace. So it's how do you develop those transferable skills and almost leave the really deep AI training to them? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:56

So what what would you what advice would you give to organisations in terms of their um early careers attraction strategy? Um you you see lots of it, you're seeing it every day. Yeah, you're in the market. Is there any advice you give to them? Things maybe things they should improve or or things they should think about.

SPEAKER_00 33:13

Yeah, there's there's definitely a few. So I think um, I mean, one piece is around volume. Um, almost every employer, pretty much every employer that we partner with, their application volume's gone through the roof with AI. Um, so it's how do you find the needles in the haystack, there are sort of gems in there. Um, so part of the way that our philosophy would approach that is put a little bit more friction ahead of the application process. So if you um instead of a student being able to just click the apply button and apply to a hundred companies using AI, if they had to do an hour experience uh as a day in the life in that role before they could click apply, how much higher would that intent, that understanding be? Absolutely. So that's sort of sort of uh, I guess a fairly simple uh use case for it. I think another um maybe more general thing, especially with the um economic landscape at the moment and uh pressures on employers, how can you bring more uh different areas of the business together and link those activities? So we often we work um either with early talent and HR teams or we work with um social impact, CSR, educationally liaison type teams, and frequently both. And that's someone we see a lot in the the corporates and enterprises we support, is those teams often don't always talk to each other. Um so that you've got a load of great work going on from a school engagement, university engagement perspective over here, and then you've got the early talent team who are uh doing their hiring work over here, and actually linking those two uh together to provide a really uh massive funnel from the engagement activity, which benefits the organization from a social impact perspective, from an ESG reporting, and then flow that pipeline into the early talent through nurturing over a number of years and that sort of one, and then also linking the social impact to the bids and tenders procurement, if that's relevant for that uh sort of organization. So I think that that collaboration is quite an interesting one, and also from a uh with a tech lens on it, uh almost like a one-to-many approach. So if we're building stuff for a multinational in the UK market, it's not a lot of work necessarily to uh adapt it for the US or for another region. So can you build it once and then open it up wherever you've got um got needs sort of globally?

SPEAKER_02 35:30

You picked up right at the beginning you uh of of that point. You picked up on something in terms of asking a so we've got we've got this massive funnel, we've got more because of click apply and all these reasons why you've our candidates can come through the funnel. You talked about um making them do some work at the front end, you know, whether it's the hour activity and things. Is there something that Spring Pod can kind of help employers with in terms of kind of creating the immersive activity or something like that?

SPEAKER_00 35:58

Yeah, exactly. It's it's um it's it's what we've always done, but not for that use case. Yeah. So we basically we create um career simulations. So if it's um Rolls-Royce, it might be an aeronautical engineer uh experience where you do a day-in-the-life activity, you know, you're uh assessing the turbine blades and then you're moving on to the airflow over a wing and and doing different interactive activities to get a better understanding of that. We have we started with that as a way to inspire and uh support young people to become aware of the career, but it's dual use, so you build it once, and then actually that can sit ahead of your application process. Um, and then there's another way that we're seeing quite a few employers use it as well is at the end of that application journey for unsuccessful candidates and successful, but for unsuccessful, the 99% you might be turning down. Sorry, but here's an experience with us that will help you get your next role. So that sort of positive candidate experience piece. And then for the successful ones, it's that onboarding, uh early onboarding piece to prevent churn before they turn up on day one and to get them up to speed faster. Um, so it can be used in sort of a few different areas there.

SPEAKER_02 37:05

I think it's a really interesting concept to kind of build upon. I think it is just to stop to a certain extent getting someone, getting the candidate to immerse their time in it, you know, and different organizations are doing it slightly different ways. They're trying to find out, you know, ask them questions more about the organization, what do they know, those types of things regarding it to an effect that can be done by a large language model relatively quickly, but you do allowing that research. But to actually have a an activity where you actually go commit your time before you get through the application, I think there's something to build upon in doing that.

SPEAKER_00 37:38

So it's really and there's possibly another uh area, sort of the supply chain piece. So a lot of the big enterprises that we work with typically they don't struggle for applications. If anything, they've they're inundated, but their supply chain does in a lot of cases. So if you could uh almost redirect those unsuccessful candidates to their supply chain at scale with uh a um a certificate from the enterprise that they've done this activity, they've shown intent, etc. And that's a way to sort of spread the talent, hopefully, into their supply chain as well.

SPEAKER_02 38:08

Yeah, great. So um getting into kind of one of the more final questions, uh, what advice would you give um to, I guess basically the UK kind of career advice about the things, you know, uh things we should think about, things that we've talked about a lot today, but things that you you know, tangible things that you know we should we should as whether we're we're UK PLC or whatever in terms of things we should do, and whether you're in the education system, uh around what are the things we should be thinking about.

SPEAKER_00 38:41

So I think from a policy perspective, um I'd say we've got to think about the incentives for employers with regards to work experience and experiences of the workplace. Um, so how do you build something that uh incentivizes an SME to give opportunities to young people at scale? Um now, whether that's through uh project-based learning where they're the employer's getting a real solution to one of their real problems that we're sort of uh working on, or whether it's a financial incentive or some sort of uh levy or whatever it is, but I think there's got to be something there that moves the needle from one in three young people getting work experience at the moment to three out of three. Um that's from a policy perspective. Um, I think the other bit that's missing, uh, and we've worked with the likes of the the careers and enterprise company to do fantastic work. Um, but is there an opportunity for government or an organization to build some sort of um efficacy framework? So if you think about from a school's perspective, you've got so many options. You can bring in mentors, you can do careers fairs, you can uh do work experience. You don't really know how effective each one of those is. It's not like you can look at that and go, this has got this uh level of impact on young people's futures. But that could now exist. You've got destination data, you've got the input. Can you have some sort of framework where you can put all of these different really well-meaning initiatives through that and they can make an inform more informed decision? So a little bit blue sky, but that's uh that'd be really cool. Um so I think that's probably from from those perspectives. Uh, on the employer side, yeah. I think it's it's the um more off-the-shelf um solutions to engage in with young people. So it's not just a five-week five-day work experience or nothing. There's a huge range there, but how do you make it easy? Um, whether that's through a central government portal or something uh that that makes it a lot easier for them to just uh offer some support to young people.

SPEAKER_02 40:48

Good. Excellent, Sam. So a fun way to always finish a podcast uh with you, quick fire round, do it, do it with every guest uh that I've had on. You can give one-word answers. Sometimes two ans two words are allowed, and I'll quickly fire through them. So apologies for me to stand looking at my iPad here. So here we go. So coffee or tea? Coffee, text or call? Text, degree or apprenticeship? Apprenticeship, uh, LinkedIn or TikTok? LinkedIn. Uh virtual or in-person work experience?

SPEAKER_00 41:19

Virtual.

SPEAKER_02 41:20

Uh passion or pay? Uh passion. Um Careers advice in the UK schools fit for purpose? Yes or no?

SPEAKER_00 41:30

No.

SPEAKER_02 41:31

Uh biggest myth about Gen Z in one word.

SPEAKER_00 41:35

They lack amb uh lack ambition. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 41:38

Uh so finish the sentence. Schools should do more. Uh careers advice. Careers advice. Employees should do more. Opportunities. Um best decision you made at 18. Uh travel. Finish this sentence. Careers of uh sorry, careers of guidance in the UK is inadequate. And then finally, uh the future of early careers is exciting. Good. Well, thank you, Sam. Uh, really enjoyed the conversation today. Um, I'd just like to remind everyone the current report is is currently available on both Spring Pod and Amberjack's uh website. It's a future decision making um for the Gen Z uh community. So please please go uh go ahead and find that uh on our website. It's a great read um and plenty of uh useful information that you can take going forward. Uh thanks again, Sam, for listening in, and we'll be back again soon.