Why the UK's Biggest Tech Firms Are Doing Work Experience Together

Only 9% of UK tech workers come from low socioeconomic backgrounds, and just 29% are women or non-binary. Separately, 62% of young people not in education, employment or training say a lack of work experience is what's actually holding back their job prospects. Those three numbers together are why Cisco, working with delivery partner Connectr Early Engagement, built the Discover Tech programme, and why it launched as a joint effort between founding partners Cisco, Accenture UK&I, Adobe and IBM rather than any one company running its own scheme.

The format is two days, not one. Day one puts around 300 Year 12 students together at a single venue covering programming, cybersecurity, AI and digital storytelling, essentially a broad, low-stakes taster across several tech disciplines at once. Day two splits students into smaller groups who actually visit employer offices, moving from abstract exposure to seeing a real workplace in person, which is a deliberate structural choice: a single day of talks rarely changes anyone's mind about a career, but a second day inside a real office setting is a different kind of evidence.

The February 2026 London pilot, with 112 students, is the clearest evidence the approach works: 87% of participants had at least one social mobility marker, 50% were female and 87% were from minority ethnic backgrounds, meaning the programme genuinely reached the students least likely to already have a route into tech. The outcomes were strong too: 93% said they were more likely to consider a tech career afterwards, and 91% said they were more likely to consider a career specifically at one of the participating companies.

Cisco UK & Ireland's Kathryn Baddeley put the logic plainly: "This is about scaling beyond what we can do alone. The scale of the challenge in the UK tech sector is simply too big for any one company to solve." That's a genuinely unusual thing for competing employers to say out loud, since work experience and early talent pipelines are normally treated as a competitive advantage to guard, not a shared problem to pool resources against.

The programme is expanding on that logic: July 2026 sessions in London and Manchester (300 students each) added CDW, FDM Group and Kao Data as new partners, with a stated target of reaching more than 1,200 students across the UK by 2027. For any employer reading this and wondering whether their own work experience scheme is worth the overhead of running solo, the Discover Tech model is a live example of the alternative: smaller individual cost, shared reach, and a measurable jump in how many students actually consider the sector afterwards.