The Buckinghamshire Business Awards 2017
We are delighted to announce we have been chosen as finalists for the Buckinghamshire Business First ‘Apprentices and Young People Employer Award 2017’ sponsored by Buckinghamshire County Council. It’s great to be part of an award that celebrates success and excellence in young people within our local business community. Opportunity and development to young people is really important to us here at Uprise Up, and it’s great to be recognised for this. This is the first time we have entered an award and we are so excited to be in the running!
At the heart of our business is our people. Over the last year we have grown from 6 to 14 active employees, who are predominantly young people.
We have found many benefits of employing young people (under the age of 24), one being they bring a whole new skill set to the table, be it in graphic design or tech level or creative thinking, or ideas to improve processes in house. They also prove to have a good attitude and eagerness to learn and grow and always keen to do well.
The main advantages are:
- The work that we do is new and quickly evolving and there is a shortage of professionals with the right skills. Young people are already digitally literate and they pick everything up exceptionally quickly.
- Young people have a good level of knowledge of the digital landscape and are often very creative thinkers. We value their strategic input from the start.
- Young people also often have some digital skills already, including photography, website design, graphic design video, social media. This all helps tremendously with the depth and breadth of the services we deliver.
- This generation of young people in particular have shown a fantastic attitude. They are motivated, determined, eager to learn and always very positive.
- Young people are very open minded and receptive to change. As we have developed quickly as a company, there has been rapid change and all of them have adapted perfectly.
We are also proactively involved in the education of young people, though offering work placements and voluntary training through Young Enterprise.
In addition, we are starting to work with university’s to offer work placements:
- We have recently teamed up with Santander Brunel University and are a member of their internship scheme. The Santander Universities SME Internship has been designed to provide students and graduates the opportunity to gain valuable industry experience in their chosen field. The internships are 6 weeks, working full time and can start anytime between February and August 2017– Uprise Up are very excited to be part of this.
- We are currently part way through an employer application with Manchester Metropolitan University. Once this is complete we will be offering 9 – 12 month placements in a ‘sandwich course’
We have a solid internship program and have taken on 5 young people on this scheme within the last 12 months.
Training and developing young people is at the core of our business. All new joiners have induction training to our systems, software and processes. Then we have a series of internal training programs on a variety of subjects (both at a basic and an advanced level) including:
We also have an established process for developing Young People’s skills. Each new starter is placed in a team and the team head (an Account Manager or Director) takes responsibility for that person’s development.
Being both Google and Bing partners, we have priority access to training sessions at both Google and Bing. We find that being able to send staff on trips to these big worldwide brands for training is pivotal in engaging with our staff and maximising their enthusiasm for their work and our product. Also, the training that these companies offer is excellent.
Uprise Up frequently invest in external training so that our young people don’t operate within a bubble at and are very much a part of the wider Digital Marketing Community.
Uprise Up truly believe that these young people are the future of our country. We are thrilled so many of them are interested in Digital Marketing, as this is a big industry and will only continue to grow in the future. We feel very proud to be part of that, and to be able to reach out to the young and offer these great opportunities.
We also recently volunteered to work with Young Enterprise, the UK’s leading charity that empowers young people to harness their personal and business skills. Uprise Up gave Digital Marketing talks and training to students aged 15 – 16 years involved in marketing for their school’s team. We have also agreed with Young Enterprise to run a more involved program of talks in the next academic year (from September 2017).
We’re excited to be a part of Buckinghamshire Business First ‘Apprentices and Young People Employer Award 2017’ and thrilled to be announced as one of the finalists. We will keep you posted on our progress!
Share this article: