The Global Forum On Cities Q1 2021 -Social Impact, Hugh Chatfield, Head Of Growth, Generation UK and Ireland (UK & I).
“Youth, Jobs, Entrepreneurship, In Cities, and Inner Cities.”
The Global Forum On Cities Q1 2021 theme.
About “The Global Forum On Cities”
INSPIRING CITIES
The Global Forum On Cities is the global business and policy forum on cities organised by Things Growth. The platform partners with 100+ global leading cities, technology and innovation organisations, corporates, public entities, start-ups, incubators and industry experts.
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Speaker 4, Hugh Chatfield is Head of Growth at Generation UK & Ireland— an independant nonprofit created by McKinsey & Company which “transforms education to employment systems to prepare, place, and support people into life-changing careers that would otherwise be inaccessible. They have a methodology that they believe can serve hundreds of thousands — and eventually millions — of people who are unemployed, underemployed, or need to learn new skills. Generation UK & Ireland program creates real business value for employers and lasting career impact for participants.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Good morning Hugh. How are you?
Hugh Chatfield (Generation UK & Ireland): I’m very well, Emmanuel. Thanks. How are you doing?
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): I’m great. Thank you very much for making time today to join this conversation as part of our event series for The Global Forum on Cities.
Hugh Chatfield (Generation UK & Ireland): Glad to join you. Excited to help and be involved.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Great. Thank you. Now, as you know this quarter, we are focusing on an overarching theme about Youth and Employment and we are glad to have you. Maybe you want to start with a brief introduction of the organisation and yourself.
Hugh Chatfield (Generation UK & Ireland): Yeah, great. So, my name is Hugh and I work for an organisation called Generation: You Employed. We’re a global organisation that, that works to transform education to employment systems, to help people who face barriers to the world of work into jobs that are in demand amongst employees, in which they can thrive and build sustainable careers. We do that across 14 countries and we’ve graduated today almost 40,000 people from our boot camps with over 80% of them getting into great jobs within three months of graduating. My particular role is leading growth for the UK. We launched in the UK running programs in early 2019 and by the end of this year, we’ll be heading up to close to 500 graduates that we’ve graduated from our programs in the UK. My role involves finding and evaluating and leading our work to expand our programs, be that in terms of operating in new regions or in new professions.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Thank you. In terms of background and things that you did before you started which prepared you.
Hugh Chatfield (Generation UK & Ireland): So, my personal journey — I was very privileged, unlike a lot of the people we work with. So, I was lucky enough to attend some great schools and got an economics degree at university. I used that following a standard graduate route into a management consultancy. There were many things about my role in a management consultancy that I enjoyed such as solving tough problems. I enjoyed working with senior leaders on large scale strategic or operational problems that were very important, both across the private and public sector and the health system. However, I still wasn’t fully fulfilling me. I wanted to do something that always had an unmissable social impact that you couldn’t debate.
Some of the kind of private sector work, sometimes I found myself angling to make profitable companies more profitable and that can be useful in encouraging growth but never really fulfilled me in the ways that I wanted. So, that was one change I wanted, something with a clear social impact. Two, I wanted to do something very tangible. So, lots of the world of management consulting can be around strategy and it is clearly necessary for driving long-term change, but for the people working on it, they might not feel or touch that change on a short-term basis. So, those two forces drew me to the world of smaller social enterprise and smaller charities which are clearly having a social impact and have big goals, but they’re also doing things on a short timeline where you see change on a weekly or monthly basis. So, that’s what led me to Generation.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Thank you. Was there specific event something that happened in your life, either personal or professional, that was a trigger and made you feel like now is the right time?
Hugh Chatfield (Generation UK & Ireland): So, I think it was a general movement, but one particular memory that sparked or encouraged that movement was, I remember volunteering in a homeless shelter near where I lived in North Hertfordshire. There, I met 10 to 20 residents of that shelter and it was in almost all cases through no fault of their own that they were in that situation of disadvantage and inequality. So, there were people who had gone through a difficult divorce and the challenges around that had led them into a downward spiral and losing their job and other personal problems and many stories like this. I realised that these were motivated, skilled, friendly, energetic, interested, interesting people with lots to offer to the world and were just not being given those opportunities.
They might apply for jobs and not have the experience required or the particular skillset that the employer was looking for or they may not have the confidence to even do that in the first place, because no one told them that. So, I remember thinking about that and before that point, I’d never really known what inequality meant or felt like or was on a daily basis. After that volunteering experience where I was there for a few months making lunch and helping some of the residents, I was inspired to try and join initiatives that tackle inequality in more structural way.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Okay and how did you meet with this organisation or the first organisation you started to work with in the area of social impact?
Hugh Chatfield (Generation UK & Ireland): How did I get into working with Generation? So, I was lucky and privileged again, this theme that comes through my career and many steps that I have taken are not available to others. I was on a secondment or a temporary placement. So, this organisation in the first place during my time at the management consultancy. I did that placement for a period of multiple months. However, that placement ran out so I then sought some other opportunities in the social business, in London, working with a startup, building a digital careers coaching app, and another organization that offers an alternative housing solution called property guardianship. Both of which are clearly socially impactful things to do in the small third sector social enterprise charity space. Then on the back of those two short-term opportunities I secured there, I reapplied to a role at Generation and I started again only a few months ago for my second stint.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Oh, great. And what made you feel this is the right organisation and not another one, because coming from a management consulting background, you could have felt that you will join The Gates Foundation or the MasterCard Foundation or one of these very large organisations. But you preferred to join another type of organisation. What were the particular elements that made you feel like this is the right one for you?
Hugh Chatfield (Generation UK & Ireland): So I think there’s the role and the organisation and I don’t know which is more important and they’re both important. So, I was looking for a role where I could combine a strategic skill set that I’d acquired through working in management consultancy with an operational lens or side of it. So, I could both be thinking about what kind of moves do we want to make as an organisation to be maximizing the impact we can have over the next few years, as well as how do we launch that program next week that is the most effective and impactful it can be. So, I really want to combine those two things and my role allows me to do that, which is fantastic. In terms of the organisation, what drew me to Generation is it’s true of other organisations, but incredibly true of generation is a clear social impact case. I see this every day we are working with people who we are helping in distinct and profound ways through the bootcamp support and connections with employers and mentorship that we provide. That’s one. Two, the huge levels of ambition we have to grow from, both globally and in the UK. What’s relatively small in the UK for now, for example, training hundreds a year to be training thousands a year over the next five years. So, those two things are really clear to me that really drew me here.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Yes, and what’s the specific mission of the organisation, beyond what you’ve already shared? If you were to focus on one or two points, what’s the specific mission that the organisation has said to itself?
Hugh Chatfield (Generation UK & Ireland): So, in terms of the conceptual mission on a global basis that is to transform education to employment systems, to prepare, place and support people into changing careers in which they can thrive. That has a specific local flavour in the 14 countries we operate in, where the barriers to employment that people face are different. I’m no global expert on the employment market, but for example in Spain, there’s a very high level of youth unemployment with people who have degrees. So, our work in Spain is more targeted to that group and in the UK, a much higher proportion of the people who are unemployed don’t have degrees. So, that has a different flavour on the youth side for example, in those nations. How that translates into a mission in the UK in a very tangible sense and what we’re aiming to do is to deliver four to 12 week bootcamps, generally, full-time with a couple of part-time re-skilling programs we’re piloting. Full-time boot camps that train people who face those barriers for in demand entry level careers and jobs where they can thrive. Our mission around that is to, do as much of that as possible and make that as impactful as possible.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Sure. In terms of geographies, where is the organisation based today and how do you reach out to the people you want to help within communities or how do they reach out to you?
Hugh Chatfield (Generation UK & Ireland): A great question. So globally, as I said, we’re in 14 countries but in the UK we currently operate in and have programs running live in London, Manchester and Birmingham or the West Midlands. In the new year, we will also have programs running in Leeds and we may add other regions towards the end of next year and also expand within those regions. So not just operating directly in the cities I mentioned but broadening out. Although not in the UK, we also launched in Dublin as part of the same organisation recently.
The second part of the question is how do we find people to support in those areas? Well, we have a very rehearsed method of spreading a very wide net. So often an issue with opportunities and job opportunities is they’re not made available to particular groups. So, we really try and stop that by making our opportunities as widely available as possible.
On top of the standard online advertising, we work really closely with a range of public and private sector partners, both in the commercial sectors and more in the third sector to make opportunities available to young people. So, that could be systems of work coaches across the job center network or could be working with organisations like The Princes Trust that have a national footprint. It could be working with organisations that have a localised potentially faith or specific community-based footprint. That enables us to hit very high levels of diversity on our cohorts of which we’re particularly proud. So, for example, for some of our recent tech programs, we’ve been getting more than 50% of our cohorts identifying as female, which is huge compared to the industry averages. We’ve had very low proportions of ethnically white people on some of our recent cohorts as well, showing that we’re reaching a very wide range of ethnic and cultural diversity. We also tend to over and under respectively meet the national average for free school meals and university degrees. I.e. a high proportion of the people we work with had free school meals when they were at school and a low proportion of the people we work with have university degrees and if they do often in irrelevant sectors to where their true passion lies
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Sure. I know we’ve slightly covered this question so far, but just to make sure we fully address it, what are the needs or the adversities that they are faced with when they reach out to you?
Hugh Chatfield (Generation UK & Ireland): So it’s a range of things and I would hate to generalise and feel like I’ve missed someone’s story because everyone’s story, challenge and personal battle is unique. But some common themes we have are a lack of experience. So, lots of even entry-level roles with many employers come with a need of some form of experience, either academic or employment in and of itself. Many of the people we work with don’t have that or cannot communicate why the experience they do have is relevant. That’s one area.
A secondary is the very fact that the individuals we work with are from underrepresented or underserved groups. There are various forms of structural inequality, both overt and covert that underrepresented groups have to deal with that I couldn’t possibly comment on without the lived experience myself. For example, large-scale protests across the world have demonstrated and we work with lots of people who have been on the wrong end of that type of stigma and discrimination. Thirdly, I’d say it’s not another category, but there’s another category of lots of individual specific challenges. So, for example, we work with people who are care leavers. We work with people who have a dependent in their family who depends on them for some form of support. We work with people who have a mental health challenge or a learning disability that has precluded them from progressing in the way they wanted to at school. All that range of things, both as a one-off challenge or an intersectionality of those challenges can really hamper the progress that some of the young people we work with can make without support of programs like us.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Obviously, there’s no specific type of profile. But generally, who would they tend to be in terms of their gender, ethnicity, social background, education, work experience or whatever else?
Hugh Chatfield (Generation UK & Ireland): Yes, I touched on this, but if we take one of our tech programs in the UK, we look for three things. One, motivation to pursue a career in the particular space. So, in tech that might mean you’ve started looking at tech blogs on the side, or you’ve done a bit of bedroom coding, as we say. It might be that you’ve tried to get in loads of jobs in this space but just kept getting rejections. So, we look for that real motivation in tech that’s evidenced. We look for a social impact case. We look for people who as I just said, have struggled to find a job on their own back, or there’s some barrier that they face that means that they couldn’t find a job by themselves.
Third of all, we do sometimes filter for some base levels of numeracy and literacy that are required to achieve the jobs that we then line up for people on those particular tech programs. Then in terms of the typical profile we then get, I think it’s horrible to say there’s an average profile, but our cohorts of 20 to 25 are relative to industry averages or population averages more likely to be female. We’ve hit 50/50 on recent cohorts and about 50/50 on one of our recent London cohorts of which we were very proud of, especially given the lack of gender diversity often present in tech. Very high levels of ethnic minority, underrepresented or underserved groups and relatively low levels of white Brits, for example. Relatively high levels of a self-declared mental health, learning disability or need — is not a severe disability in that sense in the way you might imagine, but have precluded them from potentially progressing at school in the way they desired to and have the potential to. High levels of previously depending on free school meals and relatively low levels of having a university degree or higher education experience. We typically aim to reach those underserved groups that would struggle by themselves and that’s hopefully what we achieve, and we put a lot of time into getting that right.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Sure, thank you. In terms of achieving your impact, you’ve articulated your actions around programs because not everyone is a great fit for everything. So, what could those programs, solutions or initiatives be?
Hugh Chatfield (Generation UK & Ireland): Yes, so in order hit the scale of people we want to support, we need a wide range of programs. One dimension for that width is the professions that they serve. So, we run profession specific programs that train people in particular professions. So, I mentioned we have some programs in tech, but we have very specific programs in tech. So, we have a software engineering program, a data engineering program, a junior cloud operations program working with cloud computing. That’s one area, but that’s still within tech. We also in the UK and globally have a portfolio of 29 different professions that we run globally across tech, but also skilled trades, customer service, health and care. So that’s one dimension of width and variation of our programs to achieve that impact and because different programs have different desires, they suit different types of people with varying innate skills and personalities.
Another dimension is the nature of the program, so the boot camps I’ve described to you, first of all vary in length. Some are shorter courses and some are longer. They vary in the type of job they are angling for in the end — some are pre-apprenticeship opportunities, so they feed people onto apprenticeships, which are another form of prolonged learning in role and others feed the full-time roles.
So those are two dimensions and thirdly, there’s other programs as well, other setups. So for example, the government’s kickstart scheme that has been announced in the past couple of months, is another great opportunity here to take the type of broadly youth employability support and expand it to help different groups of people with different needs and desires. We are going through processes with DWP to act as a gateway organisation to expand the type of support we can offer to these groups and therefore achieve the impact goals we want to.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Sure, thank you. You mentioned earlier very briefly the ways through which they reach out to you or you reach out to them but just to make it very clear for our anyone who has access to this content, how do they specifically hear from you? What is the first contact?
Hugh Chatfield (Generation UK & Ireland): The majority of young people who hear about our programs historically in the UK have heard about that through a partner or a collaborator organisation that we work with such as the job centers, work coaches, The Princes Trust, mentors, and executives — other support workers across that broader ecosystem. However, we also get clicks and attention through our online presence. So, if someone hearing this wanted to find out about the programs we offer, they can go to our website. Just type in Generation: You Employed UK and you’ll find us there and the programs that we offer. We also do some social media advertising and other things like any organisation advertising job roles and programs.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Sure. What’s the social impact business model, if that’s something you can share in terms of who pays for what? I guess they’re not required to pay anything or to contribute very little amounts, but what is the social impact business model?
Hugh Chatfield (Generation UK & Ireland): That’s a great question and an area that I think about quite deeply and I think it’s really important. So, first of all, yes, this program and our programs are free at the point of delivery for young people. They don’t need to pay to attend or complete or for any wraparounds that they need. So, when we’re running programs in person, not at the moment, lunch and travel are covered and occasionally we might need to provide laptops or internet connectivity for people who don’t have it. So, it should be free for young people. In terms of therefore our funding model, we’re very lucky to benefit from large proportions of government funding. So, we seek public sector funding at the national and local levels in the regions we operate in more broadly. We also are lucky to benefit from funding from corporate partners who have particular interest or relevance for some of our programs.
Thirdly, on a lot of our tech programs, and this is really where the social impact business model comes in, we ask for a contribution from employers on a payment per hire basis for young people trained by our programs. As a nonprofit, we set that price level at a fair price to reflect the costs that we’ve not been able to cover through our other sources of funding and we asked employees only to pay on the point of hire. So, at the point they’ve interviewed someone post program and decided this person is going to be a great asset to their organisation. Depending on the program or region the funding mix across those different areas, employer contributions, corporate funding and local and national government funding varies depending on the funding arrangements. But the idea is that now while we’re launching and scaling that all those factors are in play and we aim to grow the contribution from employers to cover the majority of operational costs. Therefore, it fully becomes a social impact business model where we can within ‘the system’ deliver value for employers and deliver impact for young people.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Sure and how are these young people introduced to the corporate world? Does it happen through events or is there an online tool where corporations can access their CVs, how does it work?
Hugh Chatfield (Generation UK & Ireland): So, we work very closely with employers. We engage employers as Generation ourselves around our programs often well before launch, but also when they’re running, we engage employers to say, we’re training these great young people with all these skills you say you need, come meet them. So, during our programs we offer, we generally call them employer connection events or opportunities for employers to come in and meet the young people, potentially talk about their organisation as well and build those relationships, which has wins on both sides. First of all, it allows employers to appreciate and be amazed by the type of young people that we’re working with them and the skills and the knowledge they’re accumulating. It also enables young people to really make what they’re learning feel real. So, if this employer uses something, I’ve learnt to do it makes it real. Then thirdly, we generally arrange or support our learners in securing interviews, post program. Some of our programs involve learners doing more independent job search for which we give them the tools and equip them with where they should be looking, how they should be reaching out. We focus a lot on those employability skills and on some of our programs we secure employer interviews for learners.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Sure and in terms of key figures on one hand and on the other hand, in terms of impact measurements, what have you achieved if I may in terms of how many people trained, how many people have gotten better access to jobs, anything?
Hugh Chatfield (Generation UK & Ireland): I’ll go with our key stat and then I’ll broaden it out. So, our key stat is job outcomes. We’re really looking to get people who don’t have access to jobs into roles and globally, our placement rate is that 86% within three months of program completion which is industry leading for this type of work. We’ve matched that in the UK with some shock due to the COVID crisis, but we’re rapidly heading back up towards that level now as the world adjusts again. That’s the key impact statistic, people into jobs and we’re proud of our record there.
In terms of more broadly, we’ve trained globally over 38,400 people, the last time we added the numbers up and shared that in the last couple of months. We’ve worked with over 3000 employers worldwide. We’ve delivered generally a kind of three to four time increase in income for our learners as students if they were earning beforehand. We also were quite proud of a sort of slightly more niche metric, which is that 84% of our employees we work with who we’ve surveyed say that graduates from our programs, our learners outperform their peers on their roles. We also track on more granular levels. Things like increased feelings in confidence, self-worth increased ability and confidence that they could find a job. We track all those kinds of things, but at the top level, placing people into jobs at scale in which they can thrive is really what we’re trying to do.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Sure. Thank you so much. To wrap up, two last questions altogether. First part, for those who succeed, what is the main reason or driver that explains this and for those who don’t succeed in your program, what are the reasons? And to finish, what is the main challenge that you faced with as you do this job or on this mission and what piece of policy or program or solution would you suggest to fix these issues?
Hugh Chatfield (Generation UK & Ireland): Okay. What a big question. Question one, what makes people succeed. We put a lot of things in place to make sure that everyone that we take onto our program succeed, and it’s very rare that people drop out from our programs and very rare that they aren’t successful after our programs. I don’t know whether this is true, but a clear thing that contributes to success is motivation to pursue that career. It’s having that goal in mind — ‘I really want to be a software engineer’. Once you have that everything else follows because you’ve got the drive. In terms of the major challenges that we face in our mission, definitely post Covid is finding the jobs that are there and for which employers are hiring.
So, there are over half a million different vacancies live in the UK now, but they are spread across lots of different regions. So, it’s finding those professions and the jobs within those professions that are available to young people and the period of economic decline we’re experiencing makes that harder. In terms of the one piece of policy that I would advocate, that’s tricky to think about. I would advise a policy maker to and I’m sure they will try to do this, look at the evidence of what works and scale that. So, look for where there are organisations, initiatives, people, groups, doing things that work, that gets people from a situation of disadvantage into a situation of relative advantage and a successful career. Look at the data, see where those placements rates are high and direct funding, resources, stakeholders at those areas.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Sure, a very last one. What’s the age group? Where do you think people still have the very high chance to be rescued and when do you think this is the age group where we need to maximize our efforts?
Hugh Chatfield (Generation UK & Ireland): It’s never too late. So, we target our youth programs at 18 to 29 year old’s, which is what we broadly call youth. However, people above that age range might also claim youth on their side. We’ve also begun launching what we call adult re-skilling programs. So, re-skilling programs to people outside of that age bracket. For example, we have a part-time program training people for junior web developer roles launching in the West Midlands. So, I’d say it’s never too late. Most of our programs now have 18 to 29 year old’s but that will grow and change through time.
The Global Forum On Cities (Things Growth): Great. Thank you very much. It really has been a pleasure to have you in this conversation and let’s hope to speak again very soon.
Hugh Chatfield (Generation UK & Ireland): Thanks Emmanuel.
