Thrust into a room full of enthu­si­astic teen­agers was one of my more unnerv­ing exper­i­ences this week. How­ever I sur­vived unscathed enough to Blog the tale.

This week I was invited by Young Enter­prise in Brad­ford to attend a busi­ness net­work­ing event with a ‘difference’.

Young Enter­prise is a York­shire and Hum­ber­side based char­ity that brings young people and busi­ness lead­ers across the region together in a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent for­ums and plat­forms so that young­sters (read ‘teen­agers’) can get a taste of busi­ness life from the horse’s mouth as it were.

The whole thing is a scheme that is designed to deliver busi­ness edu­ca­tion to school kids in the Brad­ford area using actual busi­ness people as facil­it­at­ors along the way. Makes sense really! Wish they’d had some­thing like it when I was a kid instead of the “waste of a week” work exper­i­ence I spent stack­ing shelves.

Still, I’m not bitter!

You can read the offi­cial defin­i­tion of the scheme on the Young Enterprise’s web­site if you’d like a detailed overview.

Net­work­ing with a Difference

Alham­bra Theatre Bradford

So there I was, along with a dozen or so other busi­ness own­ers and entre­pren­eurs (what the dif­fer­ence is between these two types of people is prob­ably the sub­ject for a cyn­ical and lengthy Blog post at a later date), her­ded together in one of the top floor bar areas of Bradford’s Alham­bra Theatre (which is avery fine build­ing by the way).

The plan was this. The 25 or so teen­agers lurk­ing at the other side of the room had spent some time learn­ing and under­stand­ing the basics and object­ives of busi­ness net­work­ing. Now it was time to put it all into prac­tice, which is why we busi­ness folk had been brought in.

There is Noth­ing to Fear, But Fear Itself!

Now I’ve presen­ted to some large groups of people, and some for­mid­able per­son­al­it­ies in the past and reg­u­larly attend many net­work­ing events across the region. All of which I under­take without a second thought.

But I tell you what! I was nervous as hell at the pro­spect of being thrown into this pit of teens! I could feel their eyes scan­ning me from the other side of the room, prob­ing for weak­nesses; look­ing for that oppor­tune moment to make a leap for my pulsat­ing jugular!

I’ve changed me mind! I want my Mummy! Was this a jus­ti­fied fear? Let’s see…

Go..

On the off, the kids were asked to either pair up or oper­ate sin­gu­larly and approach one of we busi­ness people. Armed with some ques­tions which ranged from “what did you want to do when you left school?” through to “what is your busi­ness?” and “what do you do each day?”, they were let loose on us and net­work­ing got underway.

As you’d expect some of the kids were a bit nervous and took a little while to settle into it (humour works in situ­ations like this I always find) and to be hon­est so did I. But I soon found my feet par­tic­u­larly once I’d put my “net­work­ing head” on.

After an hour cir­cu­lat­ing around dif­fer­ent groups, I was exhausted but found that I had actu­ally had really enjoyed the session.

Not being exposed to teen­agers on a reg­u­lar basis, my atti­tude is gen­er­ally gov­erned by the neg­at­ive image the media por­trays of them or what I see hap­pen­ing in the street; so I didn’t know what to expect from these alien life forms head­ing towards me.

Clouded Judg­ment

Well blow me down! What I found was not a room fully of mum­bling teen­agers but some really bright and artic­u­late young people. Some of the younger ones were a little unfocused as to what they wanted to do with their lives after school (weren’t we all at their age?) but most were really keen to develop either a spe­cific career path or get into busi­ness for them­selves as soon as they could. One bright young woman I spoke to was determ­ined to become a forensic sci­ent­ist and was already mak­ing big plans to achieve that aim.

Blimey, at 16 I didn’t even know what a ‘forensic sci­ent­ist’ was!

Makes you real­ise there is hope for our young people.

I must be get­ting old.

So did the kids learn any­thing after the event? I believe so — I cer­tainly did and am look­ing for­ward to any future oppor­tun­it­ies that YE Brad­ford might offer me.

Other Posts Sim­ilar To This One

• The Early Bird Catches the Worm
• Close Encoun­ters of the Artistic Kind
• Event: Get to Grips with Busi­ness Networking