High Tide and the Power of Career Experience on the Doorstep

For some young people, that field of view is wide. For others, particularly where families are managing real pressure, it can be far narrower. This is not through any failing of families, but because of circumstances beyond their control. The result is that talented young people can make decisions about their futures without ever knowing what their own region has to offer them.

High Tide exists to close that gap. We get young people, aged eleven to eighteen , out of the classroom and into real workplaces meeting real people, in real job roles, and learning the genuine routes into them. Our programmes span an extraordinary breadth of sectors: from automotive to animation, media to manufacturing, law and finance to engineering and maritime. Students do not just hear about the world of work. They see it, feel it, and experience it first-hand.

This is not about steering any young person towards a single job. It is about widening the field of view, at exactly the moment choices begin to narrow. Whether a week-long sector experience, a site visit, a conversation with someone who does the job for a living, these turn an abstract idea into something concrete and reachable. They are the moments when a young person stops thinking, I didn’t know that existed, and starts thinking, I could do that, and I could do it here.

Our programmes are built around real business needs, and aligned with the national Gatsby Benchmarks, so they strengthen a school’s careers provision rather than sit apart from it. And they are delivered completely free of charge, because opportunity that depends on a school’s or a family’s ability to pay is not really opportunity at all.

What gives this work its strength is that it is rooted in place. High Tide was created, and is driven, by the businesses of Teesside — employers who give their time, their people, and their expertise to the young people growing up around them. Place, for us, is not a backdrop. It is the engine.

This is what makes place-based change different from initiatives that are simply delivered to a community. It is built with a community, using the relationships, industries, and goodwill that are already here. When a local employer opens its doors to a fifteen-year-old, something powerful happens in both directions. The young person sees a future they can picture themselves in. And the business begins to build the skilled, confident workforce it will depend on tomorrow.

The impact speaks for itself. Since 2012, High Tide has connected more than thirty-three thousand young people with industry, supported by over a hundred business members from across the region. Behind every one of those numbers is a young person who left a placement with more confidence, a wider sense of what is possible, and a stronger belief that the future being built on Teesside has a place in it for them.

The Tees Valley’s future workforce is sitting in its classrooms right now. And the opportunities they will one day fill are being created on their doorstep. High Tide’s job, working alongside schools and businesses, is to make sure those two things meet. To help young people see, while it still shapes their choices, that they do not have to leave home to find a future worth working towards.

It is already here. And it is for them. We are their network.