The Privilege of Being an Enterprise Adviser

Lindsey Hopkins, an Enterprise Adviser at Fujitsu, works with New Road Academy in Telford, a school chosen specifically because at least half its students receive Free School Meals. That selection criterion matters: it targets the students least likely to have a family member who already works in a professional environment, and most likely to see careers like tech as something that happens to other people.

The core problem Hopkins identifies isn't ability, it's distance. Students without an existing network don't lack potential, they lack informal exposure: the relative who can explain what a working week actually looks like, the family friend who can say "you'd be good at that." An Enterprise Adviser's job is to manufacture that exposure deliberately, one school at a time.

Fujitsu's approach after the pandemic moved away from traditional one-off work experience placements, which are easy to run but easy to forget. Instead they built escape-room style sessions where students work through real workplace and business challenges as a team. The format matters because it puts students in the position of contributor rather than observer, solving something rather than watching someone else solve it.

Mock interviews follow the same logic. For many students, it's the first time anyone has formally asked them what they're good at and what they want. The goal isn't a polished performance, it's normalising the nerves and giving students practice at describing their own strengths out loud, something that gets easier every time you do it. Hopkins reports visible confidence shifts within a single conversation, which is a low bar to set and a genuinely useful one to hit consistently.

The wider point, made as part of techUK's TechTogether campaign around National Careers Week, is that consistency beats expertise. An Enterprise Adviser doesn't need to be the best person in the room at explaining a tech career, they need to keep turning up. That repetition is what tells a student their future is worth someone else's time.