Catherine Marchant , CEO, Impact Family Services
If you spend any time in business circles, you’ll hear a familiar concern: where is the next generation of talent coming from?
Employers talk about skills shortages, recruitment challenges and the difficulties of attracting and retaining young people. We discuss apprenticeships, training programmes and workforce development because we know our future success depends on the people coming behind us.
At the same time, many employers tell a similar story. Young people can arrive lacking confidence, struggling in interviews, finding it difficult to communicate their strengths or demonstrate their potential.
It’s easy to view this purely through the lens of employment and skills, but the reality is often far more complicated.
Today’s young people have grown up in a world that has been anything but predictable. Many spent key years of their development navigating a global pandemic, separated from friends, classrooms, sports clubs and support networks. Alongside that, they have experienced economic uncertainty, rising living costs and the pressures that come with growing up in a permanently connected digital world.
For some young people, those challenges have been accompanied by difficult experiences at home.
Not every young person starts from the same place. While some grow up surrounded by stability, encouragement and opportunity, others enter adulthood carrying experiences that have shaped their confidence, relationships and sense of self-worth long before they ever apply for their first job.
When a young person appears quiet in an interview or struggles to articulate their strengths, it can be tempting to make assumptions. Confidence and capability are not always the same thing, and the person who performs best in an interview is not necessarily the person with the greatest potential.
Most of us can probably identify a point in our own lives when somebody took a chance on us. It may have been a teacher who encouraged us, a mentor who challenged us or a manager who offered us an opportunity that, on paper at least, we hadn’t quite earned.
What made the difference wasn’t necessarily the opportunity itself. It was the fact that somebody saw more in us than we could see in ourselves at the time.
Most of us can probably still remember who that person was. Years later, their belief in us often remains clearer than the opportunity itself.
At Impact Family Services, we see the importance of that every day through Positive Impact, our programme supporting young people aged 12 to 18 who have experienced domestic abuse, unhealthy relationships or difficult circumstances at home.
I’ve met young people whose lack of confidence might easily be mistaken for a lack of ability. They seem convinced they will fail before they’ve even started, not because they lack talent or ambition, but because life has repeatedly taught them not to expect too much from themselves.
Given the right support, however, those same young people can be in a very different place a few years later. We’ve seen young people move on to employment, education and volunteering opportunities, mentoring others, speaking confidently about their ambitions and taking opportunities they would once have avoided altogether.
Looking back, it becomes clear that the ability was never the issue. What changed was that somebody invested enough time, encouragement and belief for those young people to start recognising their own strengths.
As employers, we often talk about finding talent. The reality is that some of the most promising people don’t always make the strongest first impression.
I’ve met enough young people to know that confidence and capability don’t always arrive together. Some people need time, encouragement and the right opportunity before they begin to show what they’re capable of. The young people entering our communities today will become the workforce, leaders and business owners of tomorrow, and many are still waiting for somebody to offer the same belief, encouragement or opportunity that made a difference in our own lives.
www.impactfs.co.uk