Stop waiting your turn: What young people bring to business

Written by Jacob Hollis, Sales Engineer at CB Frost 

Ask most people what a young person brings to a business and you'll get a polite pause, followed by "enthusiasm." Which, translated, means "makes the tea and stays quiet." Real value, apparently, is something you unlock with tenure, once you've been sanded down enough to fit in.

I think that's the wrong way round.

I sell industrial rubber and plastic components, and I'm usually the least experienced person in the room. For a long time I treated that like something to apologise for. I've stopped. That experience gap is one of the most useful things I've got.

When you haven't spent twenty years learning how it's always been done, you ask the daft questions. Why does this quote take three days? Why is that data sitting in six different spreadsheets?

Most of the time the answer is perfectly good, and I shut up. But every so often nobody has a good answer, and that's where a better way of working falls out.

The willingness to learn isn't a virtue; it's survival. Im doing a sales degree alongside the job, but the real education happens at my desk, learning from people who've spent decades undeerstanding materials and customers I'm only starting to get to grips with. 

The knack is holding two things at once: knowing what you're good at and being honest about everything you're not. People can smell the difference, and it decides whether you get asked back into the room.

This next bit might matter most. Between my 17th birthday and 21st birthdays, I had three job titles. 

Almost every year of my working life, I've begun again from scratch. It changes how you see things. Once you've rebuilt once, a new challenge stops looking like a wall and starts looking like a puzzle.

That's the real firepower. We adapt fast because we've had to. We'll take risks and try things that might flop, because we've got less to lose and less to unlearn. That instinct is exactly what old companies grind out of themselves as they grow. A young person hands it straight back.

None of this means we can run the place on our own. We can't, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something. Experience is real and it matters. The best teams I've seen just don't pick a side. They put the old hands and the fresh energy in the same room and let them sharpen each other.

So if you're starting out and wondering what you bring: stop trying to sound like the oldest person in the room. Be useful now, in whatever small way you can, instead of waiting until you feel ready. That day doesn't really turn up.

And if you're the one hiring: stop making young people wait their turn to matter. Give them something real to own, back them when a risk doesn't land, and you'll get ideas and energy no amount of experience can buy.

The experience will come. The fresh perspective you've already got. Use it while it's yours.