By Nathan Spencer, Director at UKREiiF

Many events at the size and scale of UKREiiF in our industry have one thing in common – they’re difficult for young professionals to get involved due to the sheer cost, with the most senior professionals in the business often taking up the tickets which have been secured.

We do need those senior leaders in the audience, that’s a key element of UKREiiF – having decision makers and influencers speaking to each other ensures the connections made help projects and plans move forward, enabling regeneration, development and investment to thrive.

But young professionals can get so much out of being at events like UKREiiF, connecting, listening to and quizzing these senior professionals – whilst there’s also a lot to be learnt from networking between themselves. We also wanted to ensure young people had a platform and a voice, which is why we created areas like the D&I and Youth Pavilion to enable young professionals to share their stories, their visions and their ideas!

Here’s a snapshot of some of the things we did to encourage young professionals to be in attendance at UKREiiF…

Partnerships

We formed more than 40 partnerships with organisations focused on D&I – and many of these had a focus of bringing fresh talent into the industry and guiding through young professionals.

From providing Young Entrepreneurs in Property with opportunities to run panel discussions which aided the members personal development, to sharing the story of Kobe who was previously involved in the Youth Justice System and got into the industry through Forging Futures which created a pathway for him to have a promising career in telecommunications. These types of case studies and stories can inspire others to implement similar programmes.

We heard from the Government owned LocatED who create schools across the UK – looking at how they’re getting younger people into property, and Regeneration Brainery who brought a number of school leavers and undergraduates to truly immerse themselves in the UKREiiF event. Partnerships are crucial and enable us to do more with the resource we have whilst giving opportunities via our platform that would usually be out of reach.

Complimentary and Discounted Tickets

For every five tickets purchased we provided businesses with a free Under 25 ticket to enable one of their young professionals to attend – and we also offered a 30% discount on all tickets for those who are Under 30 years old.

This ensures businesses who wanted to support their young professionals could, and in some instances we forged an even deeper relationship, with an example being Rider Levett Bucknall where we agreed for further young professionals to be in attendance so we could host a workshop with other young professionals from different businesses and disciplines – sharing knowledge and discussion key topics between senior and young professionals.

We also activated the student market – building relationship with local Universities and even some of those further afield such as Manchester and Oxford Brookes, enabling their students to attend.

Awards

This year we created a set of awards to celebrate young professionals doing great things in the industry – winners included Emily Walker of Rider Levett Bucknall as the Apprentice of the Year and Tarisiro Fundira of Mott MacDonald as Graduate of the Year. We also celebrated those doing great work to promote more young professionals in the industry with Pooja Agrawal of Public Practice winning the People and Skills Torchbearer award, and Rebecca Clarke of Stantec winning the EDI Champion award.

Pre-Event Engagement

Ahead of UKREiiF we worked on a number of events which saw us speak alongside Young Entrepreneurs in Property and several other key businesses involved in UKREiiF like JLL and Leeds City Council. These events enabled us to promote the event to young professionals, give them tips and tricks on how to maximise the event, and ensured they benefitted from the fringe programme.

So what are the plans for 2024…?

We don’t rest on our laurels at UKREiiF, and we have already kickstarted plans to build on our activity year on year.

We’re planning more pre-event activity with local young people including networking training sessions with the Universities and organisations like Young Entrepreneurs in Property, Junior Lawyers Division and Leeds Society of Architects.

We’ve also set up Team Leeds, a public-private sector collaborative working group aiming to ensure UKREiiF’s platform is utilised further to engage young professionals in the lead up to and at UKREiiF, with a youth fringe programme set to feature.

And we’ve secured more partnerships which are set to focus on promoting the industry to younger professionals in under-represented groups – with new partnerships with JHive who are looking to enhance Jewish representation in the industry, as well as the National Association of Women in Construction, and Women in Social Housing.

If you have any questions feel free to message nathan.spencer@ukreiif.com

By Nathan Spencer, Director at UKREiiF