Gen Z Careers, AI & Democratising Experience – Talent Download – S2 Ep.1 ft. Sam Hyams

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

It was mostly around sort of careers advice and the...

The sort of disparity I saw between access for young people.

And you have some students who 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 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 technology? with the employer so that was the 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

And 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 Germany's down to like 9%.

It's not ideal but, you know, it's better than being up the high teens that we're currently operating at.

What's the problem in your eyes? Because you're working at it.

You can see it, you know, firsthand.

What's the problem with the system? Yeah.

Where do you start? I think one of the major things is, so if you think about it from an employer's perspective, if you're an SME, what are the incentives to bring a 15, 16-year-old into your organisation? It's a lot of hassle to do.

You have to think about tasks to give them.

You have to take your colleagues' time to sort of make sure they're being looked after throughout the week, et cetera.

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 experience as a 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 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 SpringPod does at the fully virtual end of the spectrum.

But you could do a 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.