Manchester-based developer Capital & Centric is tackling the problem of a lack of diversity in the industry with a mentoring programme to inspire young people from varied backgrounds to start a career in regeneration. Here, co-founder Tim Heatley explains the initiative and how he wants to work with other property companies to roll out the Regeneration Brainery concept across the UK.
How did the idea come about?
Capital & Centric is a small company, so we have limited ability to influence the make-up and demographic of the people that are employed in the regeneration and property sector. Therefore, we wanted to look at some kind of way of redressing the fact that when you are at any property event and you look around, the people who are in that room are generally of a certain demographic. So there is an opportunity to get a much broader demographic into our industry and to learn from them.
Who is it for?
We wanted to target young adults at a point in their lives when they are looking to choose a career, and to see if we could attract people from a broader range of social and economic backgrounds into the industry. The education sector does not provide any signposting to property and regeneration, so we miss out on a huge amount of talent while other industries get the best of that talent because there are already pre-existing signposts for them in the industry.
How does Regeneration Brainery work?
Brainery is an Americanism, it’s a US concept, which is about knowledge transfer from people who have a knowledge in any particular area to a different group of people. We did not want it to be called a course, or an academy, or any overly-educational name because it’s not educational really, it is meant to be inspirational.
We didn’t want to teach people how to be an architect or a quantity surveyor, a project manager, or an agent, we just wanted to inspire them and show them what a vast and broad variety of careers there are in the sector.
These young people are prepared to give up their holidays, or they are prepared to give up earning money elsewhere to spend a week with us. And then we crowdsource mentors from across the industry to come and talk about the broad spectrum of different jobs, careers and personalities that are involved in property development.
Tell us about the project the brainees had to do
It’s hands-on, so rather than just sit and listen to mentors all day, we wanted to take them out on to site, take them around projects, completed, under construction and about to start, to give them that broad spectrum, so they can see a bit of process and the progress that gets made through property development. We also wanted to let people have a bit of a go at it themselves. We gave them a project, a particular site, and we used it as a basis of practice, a place for them to see how they could develop that site in different ways.
We selected a site in Manchester city centre and let them use what they had learnt during the course of the week to come up with ideas about how to adapt and develop the site. It was interesting to see what they had picked up on, what they had learned, what influenced their proposals, and remarkable to see how much progress these young people made in just a week. They came up with some fantastic ideas.
Why does it matter?
Getting young people into the property regeneration sector brings in new ideas, concepts and approaches to how we can do things. It helps the whole industry to be able to learn, adapt and survive, especially at this juncture, when things are changing rapidly through technology. And, of course, the younger demographic is massively more tuned in to what’s going on and what’s relevant, so it helps us to continue to improve and change.
How much impact does it have?
We are all asked to contribute to charitable things, and it’s very easy to write a cheque, tick that box and move on, but here we wanted to go beyond that and give our time and our effort. The most valuable thing that we can all offer is our connections, and one thing that these people don’t have is connections into industry. Sharing our connections with them is much more valuable than anything else we could do.
How can firms get involved?
We hope this model of creating connections for people, creating new networks for them, giving them new routes into the industry, can be emulated. We can provide a platform for property companies to adopt a similar approach and take it forward. A lot of the hard work has been done. It then just becomes a case of lining up mentors, and allowing property-related businesses to demonstrate what it is they do, how they do it and where they do it. And as long as you have a willing set of property professionals, you’ve pretty much got it made.
What next?
We hope that, over the next year or two, we can continue to run Regeneration Brainery events, not just in Manchester, but also in the other major cities around the UK.
We would like to hear from organisations that are interested in taking part or even running their own Regeneration Brainery. We would happily provide them with the platform, the information and everything needed to do that. We would like to think that there could be a series of these courses happening across the UK that could eventually result in a more varied, eclectic professional line-up in the regeneration sector.
Find out more at http://regenerationbrainery.co.uk
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