tech city apprenticeships (tca)
East London had one of the highest youth unemployment rates in Britain — and one of the fastest growing creative and digital economies, centred around Old Street's Silicon Roundabout. Those two facts existed in the same postcode and barely touched each other.
In collaboration with Mother London, digital agency POKE and Hackney Community College, we created Tech City Apprenticeships — a programme designed to connect inner-city young people with real opportunities to earn while they learned at some of London's leading digital agencies. This wasn't a communications project. It was an ecosystem intervention: building the bridge between a community that was being left behind and an industry that didn't yet know it needed them.
the approach
The brief was straightforward on paper: connect young people in Hackney with the digital economy growing on their doorstep. The reality was more complex — an industry that believed it was open and a community that knew it wasn't. Before any communications could work, that gap had to be honestly named.
The approach was to build something that felt like an invitation rather than a programme — language and design that spoke directly to young people rather than at them, that made the opportunity feel genuinely accessible rather than institutionally distant.
The work confirmed something I've returned to many times since: the most important communications challenge is rarely about clarity. It's about trust. And trust starts with understanding exactly who you're talking to and what they actually need to hear.
project impact
The programme created a direct pipeline between inner-city young people in Hackney and the digital creative economy growing on their doorstep — at a moment when that connection didn't yet exist.