How does our internship programme differ to the Government Kickstart Scheme?
From championing flexible working to empowering young people to follow their interests and pave their career path, we share the approaches which make us different from the Governments Kickstart Scheme.
Two people sitting in an office booth talking
One of the many reasons I first piloted our collaborative work placement programme back in October 2019 was because I really wanted to provide paid work experience opportunities for young people within my business. However, as a sole trader in my first year of trading at the time, the Government funding initiatives and University placement schemes were extremely inaccessible to me.
I connected with other business owners and freelancers that shared my desire to bring young talent in to support them in their work, and found that they all faced similar challenges to me. They did interesting work, they would be inspirational mentors, but they couldn’t commit to hiring someone themselves without the right infrastructure and support. We soon found that working collectively we could create an entirely self-funded and mutually beneficial work placement programme, where Collaborative Future took the responsibility of hiring, paying and training the young people so that our businesses could focus on doing work with our interns in a more flexible capacity.
One year on, after incorporating as non-profit social enterprise and creating paid work experience for 20 young people through our collaborative and flexible programme we were excited at the prospect that the Government Kickstart Scheme might enable us and our community of businesses to expand our impact and deliver a transformational experience for even more young people. Sadly, our application was rejected due to the size and age of our business. But seeing the likes of KFC access millions of pounds of funding to hire thousands of young people whilst our incredible collective of independent businesses were overlooked has left us determined to keep building on our successes in spite of the lack of external funding.
Today, we open applications for our third cohort of interns for 2021, and we wanted to share a few ways in which our programme differs from the Government Kickstart Opportunities:
Our internship is open to unemployed young people and underemployed who are working or studying part-time. While the government kickstart scheme is specifically for unemployed young people in receipt of Universal Credit, we know that there are also millions of young people stuck in low-paid and insecure work which doesn’t make use of their skills.
Many of the government kickstart opportunities are minimum wage jobs. But we’re an accredited real living wage employer paying £10.85 per hour. We’re hiring our interns on 3-day a week contracts for 6 months which means they earn over £1,000 per month, in comparison to £610 per month in minimum wage Kickstart placements.
The beauty of our programme is the way we pair our young people with multiple different businesses to build connections and gain a wide-range of experience and skills. We carefully match our interns based on their skills, interests and character to ensure they can really thrive in each placement. Many of our previous interns have found this has enabled them to really explore their career options with different potential employers, or to consider self-employment as an option.
Our programme champions flexible working. We empower our young people to define a working pattern that works for them and enables them to fit work around everything else in their life. Whether that’s flexing around caring responsibilities, personal projects, other part-time jobs or just the times they know they do their best work.
Our businesses and young people learn together through our extensive training and coaching opportunities. This is a great way not only to gain skills and knowledge, but also to build resilience through connecting with others in these spaces. Plus, it’s a really great way for everyone on our programme to gain a fresh perspective, often sparking new ideas and creating new opportunities to collaborate.
If you’re 18-24 years old and want to be part of our internship programme you can apply now. In order to be eligible you must not be in full-time education or employment. Deadline for applications is 23rd December 2020.
If you’re an independent small business or freelancer who wants to grow your capacity in a flexible way, benefit from new skills and perspectives, and work with our talented pool of diverse young people, find out how you can get involved. If your business is able to access funding via the Government Kickstart Scheme, we can still support you and your new hires to thrive through our unique Kickstart training and coaching packages - get in touch to find out more.