There are clear routes into careers like Law and Medicine, but the route into advertising can often feel like a guarded secret, and that’s assuming it’s even occurred to someone as a career option! How do you get the best and brightest of the next generation to pursue a job in an industry and at company like ours? And how do you help those people get the opportunities they need to kickstart their career?

We’ve recently embarked on a partnership with an organisation called Citizens UK on a programme called Good Jobs, which aims to provide solutions to both of these problems. Firstly, by exciting young people in our local schools about working in advertising through talks and workshops. Secondly, by providing internship opportunities to the sparkiest sixth formers to get experience of this brilliant and bonkers business we call advertising.

To that end, a group of us took a trip to Clapton Girls Academy to face one an especially intimidating audience: 100 16-17-year-old students. An initial show of hands told us that not a single person in the room had ever remotely entertained the possibility of working in advertising. Good start.

After a whistle stop tour of our work, people and occasional exotic shoot locations that together constitute a small part of the thing we know as ‘advertising,’ a final show of hands told us that we’d managed to persuade a good chunk of the audience to consider a career with a company like W+K. Win.

We also achieved what the staff tell us was a school assembly first: a round of applause for our creds film. Major win.

Next up we’ll be going to Bethnal Green Academy. Watch this space for an update.