Latest Interviews
Sally Davies – ‘Growing Ambitions’ For Career Talk Service
Posted: Tuesday 26th Aug 2008
Like talking to young people? Sally Davis believes that you can really make an impact in young lives by taking an interest in them – even if for just 20 minutes. Her organisation – Growing Ambitions – introduces would-be career speakers from business and industry to career-curious youths at schools, colleges and universities.
Sally’s background is 20 years of working in Public Relations and marketing communications, and she is also a fellow of the RSA and a member of the Institute of Career Guidance and Chartered Institute Of Public Relations.
Sounds impressive, but her motivation for setting up GA was to make a positive difference to young lives UK-wide. “I started Growing Ambitions in the spring of last year, as I really could see that young people need more input from the workplace, to get good career ideas. And I felt that the Internet was the natural tool to use to broker the introductions.”
Her main inspiration, however, was much closer to home. “I have a teenaged son of my own and when he encountered the careers service, I felt what he was offered was really lacking. He said that what he felt he needed was an opportunity to meet different people from all kinds of different jobs. Clearly this would best be provided for the age group of 12 to 21 – right from school, up through sixth form and on through university as well. Growing Ambitions serves this whole age group.”
How do these talks work? “People from the workplace can volunteer by going onto the web site and clicking on the ‘Offer To Speak’ button. There’s a form for them to fill in and they wait then to be contacted, through us, by a careers advisor. And then they have the opportunity to to-and-fro by e-mail until they fix the date that suits both parties. So that part’s very easy to do and we’re hoping that people from up to 800 career types will be volunteering. We’re aiming to build this online database to have between 30,000 and 40,000 speakers over the next few years.”
It certainly sounds quite different from other career talks. “Exactly. Our speakers are self-selectors who come across Growing Ambitions themselves or they’re told about it by their HR departments or their employer. We hope they think ‘Oh, I could do that – I could make a difference to a young person’s life’. We don’t want people to volunteer if they don’t like youngsters, though – there’s not much point!”
Growing Ambitions is a broad church in terms of speakers. “We want people who enjoy the jobs they have, whatever those are: public sector, private sector… Whether they’re newly in a job. They might be an apprentice who’s just started their working life or in their 20s or 30s, any age up through their careers. Young people are interested in meeting people face-to-face – seeing the whites of their eyes, seeing what cars they drive! Hearing from someone who’s actually doing the job makes so much difference.”
Indeed. It’s also a bit like old-fashioned Victorian philanthropy. (Long before we all decided the council could do it instead.) “Exactly! It’s very intuitive. Whoever I’ve spoken to has said it’s really such a good idea and that it makes good sense. The benefit of Growing Ambitions is that it covers every community in the UK. We have over 1000 towns listed, all over the UK, where Speakers can volunteer. If their job title isn’t listed we can add it. This means that we can always reflect the true nature of the workplace adding more career types as they develop – for example in biotechnology, or the media or internet world where things are constantly evolving. We aim to give careers advisors plenty of scope to choose from when they are looking for speakers from their own local area.”
It is still, however, early days yet. “At the moment, we’re aiming to build the database and make it as big as we can. We’re not actively promoting to education yet, but we do get contacts from schools that say ‘we need speakers in our area and we can’t find the ones we want.’ And so we’re concentrating on building the database and schools are gradually coming on stream. So the focus is more towards the workplace at the moment, because otherwise the schools won’t be able to find what they’re looking for.
Yet the idea does indeed seem to be a good one. “We did have a very successful pilot in the Portsmouth area, where we’re based. And the reaction from both the speakers and the schools and recipient young people was really very exciting. And everyone thinks it’s a really excellent idea, so I’m hoping that all the people who use the Wired Wessex site will think ‘Oh! I can give up half an hour, if that’s all it is.’ And you can opt out at any time, so we do hope that people will sign up.”
Sally also has lots of goodies for larger companies who want to get involved: “Anyone who works for a large organisation of 500 employees upwards can take advantage of our White Label opportunity. And this means that they can have the volunteering portal in their own corporate livery and on their own web site. This is very powerful as it keeps volunteering in the family, so to speak: their own employees and customers. And it also gets educators visiting their web site to find speakers. This is a powerful message in people’s communities, that a particular company is helping youngsters in this way.”
So if you’re interested, just go HERE for more details!