Sad minions

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In: Careers education, information, advice & guidance, Diversity & inclusion, Employability, Fair access, Opportunity, Skills, Social mobility
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If you work in a role adjacent to young people’s careers, you often receive requests from organisations wanting you to spread the word about internships, courses or work experience. Many requests are legitimate and I’m happy to help when I can. Many are not. Many are trying to get me to promote an unpaid job, dressed up as an “opportunity”. I imagine some such opportunities have been rejected by job sites and or perhaps their unwillingness to pay their workers extend to an unwillingness to pay to advertise their illegal employment practices. I got one the other day from a “music agency” in South London.Read More →

Scene from the Class Sketch, featured in The Frost Report, with John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett

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In: Admissions and access, Diversity & inclusion, Fair access, Opportunity, Social mobility, Uncategorized
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To promote social mobility, we need to measure it. To measure it, we need to define it. We need to identify markers of socio-economic background. To put it crudely, we need to work out what makes someone working, middle or upper class. Over the years, I’ve been directly or indirectly involved in many attempts to come up with a simple, but accurate way to define socio-economic background (SEB) for a variety of social mobility and inclusion initiatives.  Most obviously for me, this has been about university access, wider participation and career opportunities. For many years, the Office of Fair Access & Participation (now part ofRead More →

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In: Careers education, information, advice & guidance, Consultancy, Diversity & inclusion, News
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Over the past couple of years, I been doing some consultancy work for IP Inclusive, an initiative to support diversity in the intellectual property (IP) profession. I’ve been impressed by what lovely and dedicated people they are. I’ve also been delighted to be working in collaboration with the knowledgeable and utterly driven Duncan Grant and highly recommended web development team Visix.  The original job was to create some materials to promote IP careers in schools. I argued that IP Inclusive was a poor brand for this campaign: it looks at the issue from the employers’ perspective, not the students’. I came up with the name ‘CareersRead More →