Brightstar Group has opened its 2022 Young Learners Summer Work Placement programme, which will invite students on work placements throughout the summer at its Billericay and London offices.
The company will onboard a wide range of young people, ranging from year 11 GCSE students to undergraduates, and aims to inspire young people to take up a career in financial services.
This is the fifth year of the programme, and its biggest intake thus far, during which time the company has created strong links with local schools and partners, and with one school that hosts a BTEC business course.
The business course allows Brightstar to offer motivational talks, taster days, mock interview days as well as office experience to study entrepreneurialism, graphic design, and social media and IT.
Brightstar’s group director of people development Clare Jupp (pictured) said: “We are keen to welcome people from groups of all protected characteristics and this programme certainly helps us attract those who are starting out in their careers.
“This programme meshes perfectly with our culture of ‘growing our own’ and our ‘greenhouse effect’ which we are immensely proud of.”
She continued that the firm had had great success in training and nurturing young people, pointing to group chief operating officer, William Lloyd Hayward, who started out as its first administrator.
Jupp said that there are other team members who had trained to become mortgage advisors and brokers, team leaders and sales captains, or taken on other finance and PA roles.
She added that it currently has four members of the team who completed a work experience placement, adding that it was an “effective recruitment tool” for the specialist lender.
“It is fantastic to see other organisations in the mortgage industry also engaging in these kind of activities and I would personally commend this to other businesses,” Jupp noted.
