Beyond ‘Earning nothing and learning nothing’

Why Britain needs a talent strategy for social change

In 2012, I co-wrote a report on social enterprise in Britain. My colleagues and I found that many investors were struggling to find viable enterprises ready to take on growth capital.

Why? Towards the end of our research interviews, the CEOs of social investment funds and charitable foundations would often question, somewhat sheepishly, the capability and ambition of those at the helm of the ventures in their pipeline.

It wasn’t only social enterprise that had a talent issue. Around the same time, Dame Mary Marsh’s review of leadership and skills in the voluntary sector painted a picture of widespread skills gap.

It struck me that the drive, skill and intellect of the people who commit their careers to social change is critical to our progress as a society. We should be encouraging our brightest talents to focus on the problems that matter most.

Sadly, in recruiting graduates, the social sector seems to assume that selfless compassion is all that drives them.

But, like all of us, graduates have a blend of motivations. In a recent survey of 127 undergraduates from various British universities that we conducted with Bain and Company, we found that even those who wanted to pursue a career with social impact ranked ‘earning a consistent income’, ‘developing a useful professional network’, ‘building a skill set’ and ‘doing something viewed as prestigious’ as more important than ‘having an immediate social impact’ in the first two years after graduation.

The bitter pill that the social sector needs to swallow is that entry-level roles in traditional charities just don’t appeal to many ambitious high-achievers. As one recent grad said to me, these roles mean “earning nothing and learning nothing”.

But the potential to turn this around is huge.

Whether its innovative social impact education, public service graduate schemes or social venture incubators, demand for social impact career options is strong when the value proposition is right. For example, Teach First, the vanguard of this new wave of career options for ambitious socially-minded grads, received over 9000 applications last year.

Rather than a slow climb up the social sector career ladder, a raft of new pathways offer dynamic professional development and a sense of new possibilities. They speak to a generation that is ambitious about social impact, agnostic about the means through which they achieve change and unwilling to compromise their own development and progression.

We should put more firepower behind them.

We should challenge universities to engage much more with social problems, as Geoff Mulgan has, so students graduate with practical experience of social innovation. The government should extend its support of public service grad schemes like Teach First, Frontline, Think Ahead and Police Now to ensure that participants remain in social impact work, becoming social entrepreneurs, policy-makers or expert practitioners. And for those with an entrepreneurial flair, we should aim to make it as appealing to start a social venture as it is to start a tech venture, as I’ve argued before.

Most of all we mustn’t see talent development as a luxury. It is a necessity.

Until we train our social innovators with the same rigour as we train our engineers, doctors and architects, we can’t hope to tackle some of the world’s gravest challenges.

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My research into social leadership, The New Reformers, was conducted as part of my Clore Fellowship.

Here’s a short video to introduce the research: