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Opinion

Why employers need to give early talent a chance

Udrafter's Luke Morrow explains why it's time employers invested in young people leaving university, for the good of both young workers and businesses

At Udrafter, our ‘why’ is to help support early talent into meaningful work to get you onto the career path that you want to be on.

I remember being in that position myself and wondering what I was going to do. It gets on top of you.

We also want to support the mutual success between employers and interns. Businesses are crying out for support and they can get affordable support and also help give back and support early talent. Nurturing talent also has a huge impact on our UK economy.

A lot of first jobbers have talent that is untapped and a lot of businesses can overlook that and assume and stereotype these as young people who need their hand held all the time and are not worth the investment.

These people have value to give and the result of empowering them to do good work for these companies and giving them the reins to do that can have a huge impact. The creativity and energy and enthusiasm that early talent bring to a business can make them stand out so much.

It’s important to support early talent because they are talented, they are valuable and investing in early talent now means that you have got an advantage in the future because you’ve nurtured that talent and that talent will eventually become experts in their own right and loyal, valuable assets for your company.

Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty

It’s really difficult to find experts and they’re expensive so this is a different strategy to take and it’s a worthwhile one because if employers in the UK economy as a collective don’t do this the recruitment market is going to get even tougher. If we don’t invest in these people coming out of university, they’re just going to become disillusioned and the subjects they’ve studied are just going to go to waste and they’re going to go into careers that are not relevant to what they studied which is just a massive waste if you ask me.

We’ve got some of the best educational institutions in the world and we’re putting so much money into educating so why is this waste happening afterwards?

Experts need to believe in early talent, everyone does. It’s almost the same thing as supporting local businesses – support local – it’s the same with supporting early talent, it’s helping the young people get their foot in the door, giving them the environment to succeed and letting them have their shot.

As told to Becky Barnes. Luke Morrow is co-founder of intern recruitment platform Udrafter.

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