Experience of youth

3rd July 2009

This week I had the privilege of being at London’s Festival Hall when University College, London, was holding its graduation day.  The weather was glorious, the atmosphere calm and vaguely cerebral and the graduands and their families from all over the world were dressed in spectacular style.  A bright new future lay ahead.

Yet on my journey to central London I had been reading the International Labour Organisation’s latest predictions of unemployment in the current downturn.  They predict that global youth unemployment will rise by between 13.0% and 15.1% during 2009 – above the average for the world as a whole.  Similarly, the Trade Union Congress’s (TUC) monthly recession report suggests that youth unemployment is increasing more rapidly than employment in other groups in the UK and research by High Flyers, reported in the Financial Times on the same day said that graduate recruitment had fallen back to its 2005 levels.

It was hard not to look across the crowd with a tinge of sadness.  Brilliant young people launching out into an uncertain world. 

Yet a meeting later in the day with the Founder of enternships.com, Rajeeb Dey, made me realise that there is a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs to help the generation launching into the labour market now with gaining experience and doing meaningful work.  While there might not be the jobs in investment banking available (and many graduates are not necessarily interested in those these days anyway), there are opportunities in the entrepreneurial sector of the economy. 

The concept behind Enternships is simple.  Small and entrepreneurial businesses do not have the resources to use the milkround for recruitment.  Similarly, graduates wanted to learn about entrepreneurship and small business do not have ready access to this community of companies who can provide them with really interesting and useful experience.  Their website provides a market for short term placements, or “Enternships”, on a paid or unpaid basis in growing entrepreneurial companies.  There is a real momentum building behind the site and the services it provides are useful for all concerned.

We cannot expect the majority of youth businesses to turn into Microsofts.  The recent Delta “Challenges and Opportunities for Growth” study found that there just 4% of the 1800 entrepreneurs who had set up growth oriented companies were under 30.  Experience matters – and for an entrepreneur, this means telling the story as it is.  There are peaks and troughs and an entrepreneur will need versatility to get through them.

A year ago, my son was doing his week’s post-GCSE work experience.  His placement was to work alongside me doing background research to a pitch we were making for some research work.  The potential positive impact on our business was huge and we threw everything behind making our bid a good one.  He came with me to the presentation and discussed some of the finer points of the pitch to the potential client.  And he was as disappointed as the rest of the team when we were unsuccessful.

With the resilience of youth, he recovered quickly. But he'd discovered that there is more to running a business than having nice lunches in restaurants (although we did some of this as well during his week).  A year on, he is fired up, still keen to be an entrepreneur eventually but also aware that it will be something that he will have to work at!