I had the honour this week of being the guest editor for Emap’s Glasswire newsletter - take a look at www.glasswire.co.uk.

There are lots of specific hardware related issues that I feel strongly about and considered discussing in my editorial but I eventually decided to talk about one issue that affects the whole industry.  Namely, how we attract and nurture the next generation of talent.

It's a depressing statistic that nearly 1m young people are currently out of work – not only will it blight their lives but it's also wasting a huge amount of potential.

Those of us running successful businesses surely have some duty to provide employment opportunities for school leavers and graduates.  At Mila, we’ve been investigating the government’s Talent Pool programme which encourages employers to offer real work placements to graduates in exchange for them completing specific projects.

We’re also currently recruiting a young graduate to join our marketing department and we’re creating other roles within the business as we look to expand to coincide with the recovery.

It’s not just about ‘doing the right thing’ though – there are strong commercial reasons why we should all be looking to recruit and train young people.  Look around, and this industry is largely populated by men in their 40s and 50s – we need to think about where the next generation of managers and leaders is going to come from.

As the recovery gets underway, perhaps now’s the time to think about investing for the future.

Richard