Where do you belong when you’re working?
Hosting The Land Collective
The Land Collective exists to open up the property industry to young people. Sarah Hayford founded it in 2017. Since then it has been building awareness of careers across property and the built environment, with free careers advice, live events and an internship programme for young people across the UK.
Recently, Sarah brought a group to TOGETHER. Some were studying for A-levels. Some were at university. A few had just graduated or in their first jobs. All of them chose to spend the day looking closer at an industry that rarely explains itself.
Property does a poor job of showing young people how big it is. “I thought it was just selling houses,” one told us. We heard a version of that all day. That’s on the industry, not on them.
A bigger industry than it looks
Our Creative Director, Emilie Lashmar, opened with a question: where do you belong when you’re working?
She started with the first website she built, in 1998. Comic Sans, purple, clip art picture of a lion. From there it was forums and chat rooms, then physical rooms. “Nobody told me that being obsessed with how people gather was an actual job,” she said. “The tools change. The need doesn’t.”
Work has been reinvented four or five times in under 30 years. Buildings are built to last 60. That gap is where the opportunity sits. Emilie walked the group through how flexible workspace is answering it, from neighbourhood work clubs to spaces built around a single profession. She pointed them to the roles inside it too: community, operations, events, design, data. Most of those roles didn’t exist when she was at school.
Ask for something
Our founder and CEO, Elliott, shared how TOGETHER came to be. The simplest way to picture us, he said, is a hotel that doesn’t sell bedrooms.
He also shared the story of Sociable Surveyors. He started it from his university dorm during the 2008 crash, and it went on to place students on paid internships around the world. His advice was direct. The job market is hard, so do something different. Start a blog, a podcast, a walking tour of the buildings near you.
And ask for help. “So few people ask,” he said. Senior people want to help, but they’re short on time, so know exactly what you’re asking for.
What they noticed
After lunch and a tour up to Club 88 on level 12, we asked the group a few questions on camera. They have a sharp eye. What stood out to them wasn’t the view. It was the detail.
“Everything has a reason,” one student said. “Every little design change is for a specific purpose.” Another said, “Everything here has so much intention to it.”
Grace, a recent economics graduate, went straight to the bigger picture. “I never knew there was an intersection with hospitality, marketing and property,” she said. One Kingston student told us she grew up on Bob the Builder and Homes Under the Hammer. For a long time, that was all of the industry she’d been shown. “Now I realise how vast and broad it is.”
I belong at work when…
We asked everyone to finish that sentence. It’s the question we started the day with. They answered it better than we did. Their answers:
When I am myself and when I feel included.
When I feel comfortable and innovative ideas are being shared.
When I come in happy and excited.
When I want to make a change.
Why it matters
Sarah wanted the group to see how varied the industry really is, and that the skills they’d built in part-time jobs count. “People want to feel like they belong,” she told us, “and that they are taken seriously for what they bring to the table.”
When we asked what more the industry could do, she didn’t hesitate. More days like this. More open doors.
We agree. Thank you to Sarah and everyone who came. And to the student who told a friend to “just give it a go,” we couldn’t have put it better.
If you run a programme for young people and would like to bring a group to TOGETHER, we’d love to hear from you.
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