#32: Hiring Your First Apprentice, Intern or Member of Staff

Your business is beginning to take off and you realise you can’t do it all by yourself. A young person can solve this dilemma and be a cost-effective way of taking your business to the next level.

Ever thought of helping a young person get their career started while giving you back time to get on with growing your business?

Your business is beginning to take off and you realise you can’t do it all by yourself. A young person can solve this dilemma and be a cost-effective way of taking your business to the next level. Ever thought of helping a young person get their career started while giving you back time to get on with growing your business?

Working with young people

It can be exciting when you start to get successful but to hire someone with experience can be expensive. However, often, the right support you need is not aptitude but attitude.

Young people can bring energy and new ideas to your business, a passion that can be missing from the older generation. When you look at the great inventions and developments over history, they have all been down to someone under the age of 30. 

Don’t ignore the talent of young people, they are eager to learn and earn at the same time.

With this in mind, I turned to my friend, Mark Sexton of The Phoenix Partnership who run a programme for schools and young people called Essex Work Skills.

If there was a guy with some interesting insights into bringing young people into the world of work, it just had to be Mark.

Traditionally, schools focus on academic achievement, but the curriculum doesn’t always allow time to cover everything young people need to be able to face the big wide world of work.

Essex Work Skills partner with businesses, schools and colleges to offer this valuable extra support. They run practical workshops where businesses get to engage with their potential future employees. They conduct mock interviews to encourage pupils to talk about themselves, which some employers say can be challenging.

There’s an awful lot of inspirational stuff going on in schools right now – but I’ll let Mark Sexton tell you all about it. He’s been with Essex Work Skills for 12 years now, which is proof that schools think their methods work for the young people they are releasing into the world of work.