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A virtuous Circl: You can help boost children’s career prospects – Gill

by: Rob Gill, partner at Mercury Foreign Exchange
  • 29/10/2018
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A virtuous Circl: You can help boost children’s career prospects – Gill
Earlier this year I wrote a blog on my experience with the charity Future Frontiers.

 

From January to May, I volunteered as a career coach at a school in South London while also giving talks in other schools to assemblies of over 200 students, a rather daunting prospect.

Several people got in touch off the back of my blog and signed up to volunteer themselves, a great testament to the generosity within the mortgage industry.

Throughout my time with Future Frontiers I spoke regularly with their head of partnerships, Charlie Stainforth.

Charlie is hugely passionate about reaching as many students as possible and believes the key to this is working closer with businesses. He was interested in my own experience working with big banks and law firms and we talked about how he could attract such firms.

Charlie left Future Frontiers in July to pursue his vision full on. He secured the involvement of an equally impressive co-founder, Adrian Blair, a former COO of Just Eat and current non-executive director of Purple Bricks.

I met with Charlie and Adrian in the summer to discuss their ideas and how I could help.

 

Maximise career potential

In September, Charlie and Adrian launched their new organisation, Circl.

Circl’s mission is to provide school age students from less-privileged backgrounds with the skills, contacts and opportunities to maximise their career potential by matching secondary schools with businesses.

The students are brought to the business to be coached by their employees onsite, providing a convenient way for businesses to get involved plus an aspirational environment for the students.

The programme runs over six sessions in two years, equating to one day per term at the business, plus online contact in the meantime between the student and their coach.

 

Value to businesses

The key to the proposition is the huge value it brings to the business.

The employees are trained by Circl to deliver one-to-one coaching, then given a live environment with the students in which to carry out the skills they’ve learnt.

Charlie has done his research, as well as being the right age himself, and understands that young adults place a high value on engagement and social conscious from their employers.

As such Circl not only provides valuable skills, it helps motivate and build loyalty among socially conscious young professionals.

 

How you can help

Charlie has set himself a target of reaching 100,000 students by 2025 and I’m delighted he and Adrian have appointed me to Circl’s advisory board, so I’ll be doing everything I can to help reach this target.

To do this we need to speak to the right people within large banks and lenders.

These people will work within training and development or human resources at firms with a strong social conscious and which value employee engagement.

If you are one of these people, or can make an introduction to someone who is, please get in touch on rob@mercury-fx.com to find out more about Circl.

 

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