Join us for a down-to-earth journey through the highs and lows of launching a career in today’s job market. In this episode, we dive headfirst into the unpredictable world of early employment – offering practical advice, real insights, and a roadmap to success.
We’ll take you on a tour of the first-job scene, sharing stories of the issues faced by young adults stepping into today’s job market. We look at the challenges of self-employment, explore the shifting trends in university degrees, and address the complexities of dealing with student debt. Drawing from frontline experiences in retail and telemarketing, we unveil valuable lessons learned during these pivotal moments.
Our focus then shifts to contemporary launchpads for entry-level positions, with a spotlight on contact centres. We look at how these workplaces are transforming to connect with a younger, tech-savvy crowd. We’ll explore the appeal of certain companies and break down the essential sales skills that power business growth. It’s a close-up look at the know-how needed for professional success.
Get set to kickstart a career with practical insights and strategies to thrive in today’s ever-changing business world!
For more info, free resources, useful content, & our blog posts, please visit realitytraining.com.
Reality Training - Selling Certainty
Join us for a down-to-earth journey through the highs and lows of launching a career in today’s job market. In this episode, we dive headfirst into the unpredictable world of early employment – offering practical advice, real insights, and a roadmap to success.
We’ll take you on a tour of the first-job scene, sharing stories of the issues faced by young adults stepping into today’s job market. We look at the challenges of self-employment, explore the shifting trends in university degrees, and address the complexities of dealing with student debt. Drawing from frontline experiences in retail and telemarketing, we unveil valuable lessons learned during these pivotal moments.
Our focus then shifts to contemporary launchpads for entry-level positions, with a spotlight on contact centres. We look at how these workplaces are transforming to connect with a younger, tech-savvy crowd. We’ll explore the appeal of certain companies and break down the essential sales skills that power business growth. It’s a close-up look at the know-how needed for professional success.
Get set to kickstart a career with practical insights and strategies to thrive in today’s ever-changing business world!
For more info, free resources, useful content, & our blog posts, please visit realitytraining.com.
Reality Training - Selling Certainty
Bob and Jeremy's Conflab the reality podcast.
Speaker 2:Hi listeners, hi Bobby.
Speaker 1:Welcome to Bob and Jeremy's Conflab. A lovely day for it down here in Sussex. What's it like in bucks, jeremy?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've got winter sun. It's really stunning actually. I mean it's frosty, it's icy. Gotta be careful driving, especially teenagers driving. I think every morning we say the same thing Slow down, martha. We make up that. We're having reports of her driving quickly and she knows it's all bull. Someone saw you driving very quickly through Padbury. Yeah, because coming from us isn't going to have the same effect. But apart from that, I mean apart from teenagers on icy roads, it's about what did Billy Connolly say about? It's not the weather, it's the right clothing or something, didn't he?
Speaker 1:There's no such thing as bad weather, there's only the wrong clothes. Yeah, I like, and that's absolutely right. And I've actually got a new hat that I ordered, which is a bit like a baseball cap, but it is wax brown wax so it's like a waterproof baseball.
Speaker 2:Oh, wax. I thought you mean that sort of wax goes against your forehead. Do you mean waxy top?
Speaker 1:That's it, yeah, which makes me feel very country-fied down here inside.
Speaker 2:Is that a sort of British country thing, or is this an Aussie thing or what?
Speaker 1:I have no idea, but. I do feel very outdoorsy when I've got it on, which is, you know, it's not my usual focus at all.
Speaker 2:Does it have the same effect as insults? Sort of water off a duck's back, possibly, probably one of those things that shows you the droplets running.
Speaker 1:It's probably a similar effect as when you put on one of your sort of hacking jackets.
Speaker 2:You know your sort of yeah, that sort of thing, my sort of landowner wearing that. That's it, that's exactly it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's it. That's in that vein. Chicken husbandry jacket Chicken husbandry yes.
Speaker 2:I might just do a little plug for chickens. I got six free range. Well, they're not. X battery, x free range chickens. Six eggs a day, bobby. Well, I've got some of your eggs here In this temperature.
Speaker 1:I know I've got some here. I've been enjoying them. They're very, very good eggs too, so thank them from me. So we are going to be talking today about first jobs.
Speaker 1:This is a really interesting subject because we work in lots of organisations where the people that we are training quite often it is their first jobs, and the reason that this has sort of come to the fore is a few weeks ago I attended the 80th birthday party of a lovely lady who employed me in one of my first jobs. It was certainly my first proper sales job and that brought back a lot of memories for me, and I started having conversations with Jeremy and sort of saying look, you know, if you're 18, 19 years old or a graduate, just come out of university looking for that first job. Where would you go? What would it be like? And so we've both gone away and done some research into this subject and we're going to have a bit of a conversation about what it is that a first job should be giving you what the stats are around the young and employment, and also give you some ideas about what is available out there and what kind of things you should be looking for.
Speaker 2:I think the other thing is, if we look at my son, he's 20, you've got a 19 year old. I've then got an 18 year old, then I've got a 16 year old. They're all entering the job market and or thinking of entering. Why not go one at uni had a gap year. I think a lot of listeners to this will be having teens going. What should I do? And I want to make one distinction before we start.
Speaker 2:We're not dedicating this episode to talking about teenagers getting work. What we're actually talking about is, when you've left education, it's like oh right, sugar, here I go, and I think also with our backgrounds, bob, we're also and we'll share this fortunate that we had an industry to go into that doesn't really exist. In the same way, and part of our sort of thought process is what do young people do now who want to be in business? So we're not necessarily talking about vocational work. We're not talking about somebody who studies something and then wants to pursue that very specific thing. You know, I want to be a physiotherapist, I want to be a teacher, I want to be in filmmaking, whatever it might be. We're talking about people to go. I'm interested in business per se. I want to get going in business. I might become an entrepreneur, might not, but I'm interested in business. That's one of our distinctions.
Speaker 1:I have another distinction, which is I also think there are many, many young people who have absolutely no idea what they want to do, and I was like that and I found myself going in this particular direction, and that's a really good question as to if you have some idea of what you want to do. You want to go into business or whatever it may be. That's great. I think lots of people have no idea what they want to do. Even if they do degrees in certain subjects, they'll come out of university and have no clue what their next move might be, and I think that's a very good question. If you are in that, you know in that mindset, what can you do, what should you do? That will give you some valuable experience and, of course, some money.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so should we kick off with a few stats that I've drummed up yeah currently 43% of all 18 year olds are working. Yeah, in this country, the United Kingdom touching 70 million population, we could say, and that compares with 60% of teenagers working at the start of the millennium. Yeah, okay and there's a few core reasons for that. We've been encouraged to go into education plus. Technically, you're meant to be in some form of full-time education till you're 18.
Speaker 2:Yeah what I did find interesting was a few other stats. The highest employment rates recorded full stop are 1872, 1943 and 2018.
Speaker 1:In this country, well, 1943 would be skewed, because half the working population would be fighting a war.
Speaker 1:That is the skew of that, absolutely 2018 is Interesting because that would be post the Brexit referendum, yeah, but pre actual Brexit, mm-hmm. And that is also about 10 years off. The big financial crash, 2008, that's right. That would kind of do that. 1872, of course, I my history is relatively good, but I'm just wondering whether that would have been about 10, 15 years after reform and I'm wondering what acts would have come in at that point which would have Enhanced workers rights. The Heidi industrial revolution.
Speaker 2:That's another reason why that would be very, very according to the census, 76% of the working age population was employed, which is huge. Oh, it is it is All right then when do you reckon the lowest rate of Employment was in the UK? What year?
Speaker 1:what it must have been the Great Depression.
Speaker 2:It's actually a tiny bit after, it's 1932, but it's during the Great Depression. So yeah, well, you're right, it's not at the start, it's as we're underway. Couple of other little bits, which I think is also what potentially politically encouraged in our country. But self employment increased at the fastest rate from 1979 onwards and it reached its record higher 15% of the total population, total employment in 2016. So self employment, entrepreneurialism, has not peaked and in fact it's no. We're near the number since 2016 and again we could argue we've now had breaks. We've now had other pressures, changes, so there's not that many People or young people who are starting just their own things, and we know that. We've talked on other podcasts about people having side hustles. We're not talking about that today. We're talking about actually getting a job in business.
Speaker 1:I do wonder as well if there's going to be a new raft of stats that will come through for the last few years where we had a mass exodus of people from the UK after Brexit from Europe who worked here and We've had to try and fill some of those vacancies with UK residents of various types, and I think that's also going to have skewed stats as well. There's that and I think, the last thing which I think is also interesting, we've done a podcast a while ago on Student student debt, going to university, etc. The value of it. I wonder whether now, if we do have a rise in 18 year olds who are working, is that because the appeal of university, or the relative appeal of university, has been dampened.
Speaker 2:Well, not yet that sort of student leavers going into the university with inverted commas around it is still pretty, pretty high. Sure, I believe we haven't had a decline in it yet. I think we will do, because You've now got to find nine ground plus plus living costs, regardless of your level of income and the maximum grants they give you. You still got to pay it all back. So, as we've covered, sure, well, look, let's kick off. You're 19 and you're listening to this and you've left uni. You're 18, you're gonna leave school. You're a father and mother, you've got, you've got a nephew thing. What do these young people do? So, instead of going just into tips, I think it's worth exploring some of the shifts. Yeah, so Certain industries have changed and if we've got the UK landscape, one of the most common jobs that people would walk into was a retail job.
Speaker 2:Yeah and you could be pretty much guaranteed the high street was booming. We're talking about the 1980s, the 1990s, early 2000s. I'm gonna go and work on a clothes shop, I'm gonna work in a record shop, I'm gonna work in a supermarket, but that industry is very stagnant and declining. I, and so your first job in business per se may well not be in retail. So let's talk about you then. Joe, what was your first job? Retail? I worked in the Gap, ok, but that was a part-time job.
Speaker 1:What was your first full-time job?
Speaker 2:Then I took it full-time. So when I went, moved to London, of course trying to be an actor, I signed up for a full-time job in the High Street Kensington branch of Gap and I found it dreadful. And then I switched to where we're going to take some of this conversation. I switched to a contact centre in High Street, kensington and I was selling cleaning products and the very savvy guy running the team said Jeremy, do you know what we're going to put you on? I went what Private schools? I said what I said you're going to call private schools and you're going to try and get them to buy our cleaning products for their maintenance departments cleaning team Genius. So that's where I met Adrian Webster, who was on the Apprentice, and that's where he said you know, don't talk to Sooty, talk to Mr Corbett about decision makers.
Speaker 1:So Sooty was a glove puppet that was on television back in the 70s and the guy who had his hand controlling Sooty was called Matthew Corbett, and so the term don't speak to Sooty. Speak to Mr Corbett means make sure you're not speaking to the glove puppet, make sure you're actually speaking to the actual person. So that's a very good lesson.
Speaker 2:And that was probably one of the best bits of training I got from Adrian is I'm ringing a school. I don't want to just talk to one of the domestic staff, I've got to talk to the head of usually it's connected with catering actually the head of catering and cleaning, or the bursa.
Speaker 2:Well, they were, they were toughest. I realized that if you got the person who actually ran the cleaning team, they knew what products they needed. The burst didn't have a clue, the bursa just said how much. But if I talked to him about liquid degreaser to use on the school's minibuses, you didn't know what I was talking about. So I needed I needed a maintenance person. But I managed to do the classic thing of selling. So my first job was selling over a telephone. First decent job, earning, earning proper money, I should say earning commission and so on and yours.
Speaker 1:you can enlighten the listeners, so I did a couple of jobs before I got my first proper sales job, which was for this lady called Val who ran the classified department of a publishing house. And the publishing house produced trade magazines for all sorts of trades like timber and packaging and printing and all sorts of things, and at the back of each magazine with a classified ads so things for sale, products and services, appointments, jobs, going all those sorts of ads were in the back of the magazine and she created this department just to sell those ads. And what she did was you would have a group interview and then, if you made it through the group interview, you'd have an interview with her and she would say, right, here's a redstone. She put it in front of you, sell it to me. And you had to sell the stone and what you had to do was come up with enough crap to keep going and she'd say things like well, I don't, I don't like that stone, it's a horrible stone. And you say, ah, but let me tell you a bit about the stone. And you try and persuade her to have it. And if you had a bit about you, a bit of the gift of the gab and you know you had a bit of energy, she'd go right, you're in, and she'd put you in a team of people on reasonable money plus commission, and there you would learn a how to sell. B how to work to a deadline. C how to work in a team. D how to be managed by team leader that was really important E how to actually do quite well and get promotion and become a team leader.
Speaker 1:All of that happened in not a very large space. There were sort of 40 of us crowded into this one floor of one wing of this building who were doing this. But you know what? That was the best room in the entire building the buzz, the excitement, the fun, the laughter, the ribbing, the games that we all played. It was just a great place to work and it actually made you realize that work could be fun.
Speaker 1:And I think that was her great skill was that you went in there and I didn't know what I wanted to do. I didn't know that I want to be a salesperson. I didn't have any great ambition, I just wanted a job that would pay me well. And had I known what I was going in for, it was just brilliant that first year of having my own money, going to the public lunch, being able to afford things to buy myself. You know, those days you smoked at the desk and had coffee. It was just heaven and you felt like you were an executive, even though you were on a few grand a year just selling ads into the back of Max, and that, I think, was wonderful.
Speaker 1:When I saw her the other day, it reminded me of that and how lucky I was to be in that group of people, and I did a post about it on LinkedIn and loads of my former colleagues have been in touch with me saying I was there. Bob, do you remember this? Do you remember that let's make contact because we knew we were lucky to be in that environment when, from that point, our lives could grow. We could move on from there, either within that company or Do other things, but that experience was really valuable, fabulous, I mean.
Speaker 2:What I would extend from that is that entire industry, media, every single industry in the UK, in the world, pretty much had a publication.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah which was printed, yeah, and as it was printed, it cost money to run it through the printing machines. You've got to pay for the ink, the paper, the printing company, the typesetters and the way that you fund it is advertising Absolutely. And so there was an industry for everything. And and that was actually a good first job in media cells, because you learned about contacting customers, demographics, finding the buyer, putting together a proposition, handling objections, helping them understand how they get money back, talking about your audience and your readership. I mean a wonderful sort of education in business. And so that's the past, what we can say quite clearly now.
Speaker 2:We talked about the high street declining, but the other thing is the traditional office started demising from 1957, mm-hmm, as the factories started to as well, because most manufacturers had offices To deal with accounts in Port Expo, and so that there was a concurrent demise from offices and. But what's happened now in the last few years with hybrid working is more and more offices have shut, offices have got smaller. So therefore, the idea of your first job and you go into an office and there's some people in accounts and people in marketing, some people in Whatever materials, logistics that isn't such an easy thing. If that you'd have to pick the industry that still has that Mechanism or that structure. A lot, a lot of change. So if you were to be Going into advice now, bob, or tips, and say an 18 year old, 19 year old girl came up to you and said, hey, what do I do? And you know, yeah, you, we're going to school. What kind of things can we help young people consider?
Speaker 1:Reality training was created in 2001 by Bob and Jeremy, both actors who met at drama school. Reality delivers training that is effective, memorable and entertaining, with a touch of theatricality to bring it to life. We now have a company of trainers and actors who you can utilize to create change programs across your business. Please contact us via reality training dot com. Well, so let's think about our actual day-to-day work. We, over the last 10 years, have trained thousands and thousands of people who work in contact centers, not just in the UK but all over the world, and, depending on the Location and the geography in particular, you may have groups of young people in those contact centers. You may have groups of more mature people in those contact centers. You could also argue that contact centers, the service industries, have very much Taken over jobs that would have been manufacturing jobs 30 or 40 years ago, as you describe Now.
Speaker 1:I think about recent work We've done in contact centers going back a few years.
Speaker 1:When you go into some of those places which have predominantly younger employees, there is an attempt to have a more positive College-like atmosphere in those places.
Speaker 1:So how many of you and I have been to where there's a pool table or table tennis table and there's rest areas and, yeah, nice subsidized little cafes where you can eat well for not much. And If you want to have a fag, people go outside and there's, the structure breaks into your day and there's a lot, I think, that modern employers do To make the job as enjoyable as possible. Yeah, and I think if you don't know what to do with your life, you could do a hell of a lot worse. Yeah, then join a team in a contact center where you'll be trained, where you'll be trained in IT as well as, yeah, good boy skills, and you'll also know what it all the stuff I mentioned earlier about being managed and Worked to deadlines and things like that. But I think you'll also understand how businesses work, the hierarchies within businesses, the importance of Selling things to customers and keeping customers happy. There was much less of that 30 or 40 years ago. I'm gonna be honest with you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Customer satisfaction yeah, that's great.
Speaker 1:No care about that. When we were doing it, I remember that there were certain customers that we we wouldn't even ring. There was one guy. I remember his name. Can I say his name? It's 40 years ago. He can't still be alive, do you know? Well, he was, he would have been. He would have been in his 60s then, so he would be a hundred years and cheerian his name.
Speaker 1:His name was Pat Carroll, okay, and we had a load of cards about Pat. He was an advertiser in the cabinet maker Okay, that was the magazine and the front of his cards was a cartoon of a man saying don't mess around. What's your biggest trade discount? Oh right, that was him. What's your biggest discount?
Speaker 2:What was he actually trying to sell?
Speaker 1:He was selling bits of cabinet. I think that's a word. I think he was certainly a nice bits of polish wood and veneers to cabinet makers. And that was him. He. We define the characters which you could never do now. No, you're not allowed to make. No in the economy.
Speaker 2:No, this person's a real meanie.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can't say that anymore.
Speaker 2:I mean, I want to just give you the scope of this if you're listening to this. There are over 6,000 cool centers in the UK with around 812,000 agent roles. They're probably not counting.
Speaker 1:There's probably a million people working contact away more and, bearing in mind now that many will be working from home as Well, I think the hybrid deal yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, that's the other thing I was going to get on to. So that's 4% of the UK's working population At least, yeah, employed in a contact center. Yeah, here's another thing the average contact center has a hundred and twenty seven employees. But, as Bob just said, you may be somebody who is hybrid.
Speaker 2:Highly likely you do certain days at home, certain days in the team. So if you find that you can't be around people all the time, you're very likely to buy will have three days at home or two days at home. So this is the other thing that contact centers have had to provide. On ice being to my mortgage provider, they were all at home and anyone who could cut it was allowed to work from home. But if you want to be in a team and you thrive off people and you need that sort of collaborative feel, you can get that from a contact centre and you may not be able to get it in quite the same way in an office.
Speaker 1:So that now brings me on to my experience for the last couple of days. So we just started work with a new client and some of you may have heard of this client. They're called Octopus Energy and they're a relatively newcomer to the energy industry and they are involved in all sorts of things, not just gas and electricity, but they sell solar panels and heat pumps and electric cars and all sorts of things, because they have a focus on renewable energy. That's their big thing and they're expanding very, very, very rapidly and we've started work with them in one of their departments and medallion of their people and within this particular site that I visited, there's a number of things which I think are linked to what we're talking about.
Speaker 1:So, first of all, younger teens 19, 20, 21, 22 year old people first, proper job, as it were, monday to Friday, and good packages and great incentive to do well and to try hard, but also really fantastic working conditions, breakfast provided, lunch provided, really nice things that are which mean you don't have to go off site and spend money. There's showers on site so you can cycle to work and there's all those sorts of incentives to be good to the environment and good to yourself, and there's great benefits on site, which I think it's so clever because not only does it give you a good job in a team to learn your business and learn how to sell to people and learn how to be productive, but I think it also shows that here's an employer just like Val, who valued the people that they're working with, and I think that's a really important thing to look for when you're looking for that first job.
Speaker 2:So if you're listening to this and you think, well, I don't want to be in a contact centre, I want to be in business, but that's not quite me. I've got a few other tips and again it connects to our backgrounds and what Bob and I help and our team help people do. If you can find an ambitious business that has an expertise, so, for example, they engineer something, they make something, they produce something, but they don't really understand sales and marketing, that could be you. You could say so many businesses and it is. Again, it's what we find all the time. Whether we're working with big multinational companies or smaller UK only ones are only inbound in how they receive enquiries. So if you approach some of these companies and say, look, I'd like to help you develop business, I'd like to make contact with potential new customers, and you have a way of doing that and you've studied that a little bit, you can be a sales and marketing type person for a small ambitious business and this could be anything, say, a fencing, landscaping, garden offices doesn't matter what they do.
Speaker 1:Oh, I wonder what made you think of those.
Speaker 2:Well, because I've been talking to fencing people, haven't I? In garden offices people. But the people who you meet, some of them are the owner managers and actually they're technical but they're not really salespeople. They don't ask questions, they're not very skilled.
Speaker 1:Okay. So what you've picked up on there is this idea of selling something. Now, I remember many years ago, we did a talk at a school and we asked the question how many of you are going to be a salesperson when you leave school? And hardly anybody put their hands up, okay. And then we said how many of you have parents who sell things? And a few put their hands up. I would say a few more probably didn't know that their parents actually sold things. Now I think that's one thing that you are not going to be taught at school or university is the fact that the vast majority of commercial enterprises on earth are required to sell products or services to their customers, whether they're businesses or individuals. I think that realisation a bit early on, which is essentially what we're talking about here, is no bad thing, because everyone needs skilled salespeople.
Speaker 2:Now the challenge you have if you're 19 and you fit into the vast majority of young people, you buy online. You also are influenced through Tiktok to buy make up brands, clothing brands, whatever. You are used to not having interaction to make some of your purchasing decisions. So therefore, you've got to realize that there are people who are 20 years older than you, 30 years older, new, and so on, who have businesses that don't operate like that, because they're not selling consumer goods or disposable things clothing, beauty, drinks. They're not selling powders Whatever they are, jim powders, by the way they are selling Services.
Speaker 2:You know, somebody comes to your house and does something, somebody makes something and they require salespeople. So it's like who are their customers? What do they buy? How do they mark it up? What's the time to build? What's the labor cost? How can they scale that? So many businesses don't focus on any of that whatsoever. And my time at yellow pages, which Bob was talking about, his experience with Val and the classifieds my time at yellow pages was an education in A to Z of businesses, from abattoirs to zoos. What were these businesses doing? How are they trying to win customers, how are they trying to keep them? And that doesn't exist in this media landscape for you. So you have to pick a business that you think you could help.
Speaker 1:Well, I was just gonna say I mean, I hope the abattoirs, you know right, being fed by stuff from the zoos. But anyway, my point is that I Mean I think that's entirely true that that center what a business is and what it does is. There's a lower level of understanding of those things, and perhaps there might be for the reasons that you that you talk about. The other side of it is that the reason that younger people's parents are selling things is because they've managed to understand that life is really about Relationships. It's about communication and relationships in some form. Even with the huge growth of things like AI, there is still a requirement currently for good quality communication between brands and their customers, and so that is something to work on and develop and have a real kind of understanding of, because those are transferable skills that will serve you your entire life, and I think that's the other element here that you know it's very trite to say that.
Speaker 1:It's true, you never stop learning things. I've learned things this week I had no idea about. I thought I knew how people employed people these days and how they, how they developed them and Ran their commercial enterprises. Well, actually, there are people now doing it in more innovative and exciting and motivational ways that I could ever have thought of. And my last point is that you as a young person these days may well have very, very strong values about things like the environment and other elements that your parents and older people may not have. The same values Are connected to, and I think if there is something that you feel strongly about, there are industries right now recruiting people to help sell products and services that are there for those industries brilliant.
Speaker 2:I mean my last two points connect to that. You may have an interest in an industry. The other thing that you understand is you and your generation, and Lots of businesses might well be trying to appeal to you and your generation, and so you're valuable to help them do that. The other thing is it's very hard to say why you should be employed your age, 18, 19, whatever you are. Why should we take you on? Almost impossible if you're coming out of education and you haven't had a massive job experience. Far easier to flip that and Be utterly curious and go. Well, I'm. There's a few reasons, but, but I'm really fast. How do you make this and who are you delivering to? What are your best customers?
Speaker 2:If you are curious folks, you can flip anything because the person goes they are so curious in us, they like you for your curiosity, you become likable, they think you'll fit into the team. So one of my massive tips to young people is don't worry about justification all the time, of why you're suitable, because Trying to put together a CV and the owner says, send us your CV, and you're thinking, god, hardly done anything, I'm just left school and then you may not have been fortunate enough to have had a load of Nepotism and fantastic work experience and all sorts of other things. It just hasn't existed for you. Don't worry. If you are massively curious, ask fantastic questions, show your research You've done on that business and and just want to know more about it, you will be appealing and Really I think that's what. That's what I've got to say, and We've talked about various places where you can look, but you can look anywhere and that curiosity will help you.
Speaker 1:I'd also say to employers listening to this I Hope you can hear how enthused we have been by the organizations that initially employed us and how they did things, and how we're now seeing modern organizations do the same. If you want to have a business that grows over the next 10, 20 years, the investment that you make now in attracting young, talented, keen, you know, really focused individuals Is going to make such a difference. And I think perhaps all employers should look at their contracts, look at how they employ people, look at the Strictures that are 20 years old that are placed upon employees these days and think okay, we now need to think about the world that we live in, how it's changed, how individuals have changed and how we can make Working for us and being productive for us as attractive as possible To every age that we want to work for us, because that's actually going to help us sustain our business Long into the future. And I come on to the final point.
Speaker 1:It's not just about employing people, it's about keeping people, and that's what I think a great employer will do is make it very hard for you to leave. And I have to say the last few days I thought if I, if I started here at 18. I find it very hard to leave. It's a really fantastic, energized place to work and that makes such a difference. Now I also am conscious, jeremy, that you and I sound like a couple of slightly old fog is here talking about this, because we come from whatever 30 odd years of life and over 20 years running our own business, but we are that ages that will be employing the young people, absolutely right.
Speaker 1:And so we have to use our insight we do the only another analogy.
Speaker 2:I'd give just one other tip. I've talked about curiosity, if you, for example, I bumped into one of Martha's school friends working McDonald's full-time and I'm chatting to her at the window and she said she's going off to do business studies next at uni and this is a kind of gap year thing. What she could do, which I couldn't mention during the brief time I was with her at the window collecting my Macplante but what she could do is she's likely to have a manager Sit down with a manager. How long you've been working here? How did you become a manager? How is this place structured? Who do you report to?
Speaker 2:How does the franchise work? How does it work with the, with the, with the outsourcing? Do Donald's own all of this? Do they pay for that? You could just ask for somebody's time and try to work out the entire structure of that business and how it's profitable. If you just do your own job and sort of just do it well, that's one thing. But there is ways of moving up ladders, there's ways of understanding how structures work and I know that if you ask somebody politely for their time who's more senior, more experience They'll usually give it to you. So I encourage you to do that.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so. Please do you think that the advice and the stories that within this podcast are useful? Please share this podcast to people that it might certainly be relevant to. We'd really love that. And and and Jeremy, anything else to finish up?
Speaker 2:No, that's great. Thanks for tuning in. It's indeed. Thanks a lot. Cheers for now, bye.
Speaker 1:Bob and Jeremy's conflap the reality podcast.