Purpose:

Careersinracing is the brand created as part of a broad-ranging Careers Marketing Strategy for the racing industry, led by the BHA. The marketing strategy includes: exhibitions and events, digital marketing, TV advertising, print advertising, sponsorship and partnerships with organisations such as National Career Week, NotGoingToUni, Start, CareerMap, Racing to School, and the Pony Racing Authority. Alongside these core marketing activities - many of which are targeted at schools, careers advisors and school age children - we have also developed face to face advice and experiential careers events and it this activity that we have chose to report as a community/education initiative. Volunteer Career Makers and Discover Racing Days Focus: to ensure we reach into as many communities as possible to showcase the career opportunities across the racing industry, we have developed a system of volunteer career makers to go into schools and share information about working in racing. Many secondary schools now encourage employers and industries to attend schools be that career fairs or assemblies – this is in support of Gatsby Benchmarks - in particular Benchmark 5 ‘Encounters with employers and employees’. Volunteers were ‘recruited’ by careersinracing and given the title Careermakers. They range from people who work/or have worked in the industry to parents and racing enthusiasts. They are all provided with online training videos and kit including banners and leaflets to set up a stand to take into schools. Data collection mechanisms are in place to collect contact details of people interested in receiving more information. Even if they just go to their local school once a year, we feel this is a massive contribution. We would like to see more employers get involved – 600 trainers – 600 schools! This was to be a phased approach to develop this support across the industry. We launched the programme in 2019, with the bulk of in school activity starting from Sep 2019 academic year. In this time, we had 70 enquiries to be Careermakers with 30 going on to become active and 40 careers fairs in schools attended. Due to the March 2020 close down of schools during the pandemic, the initiative has halted it in its tracks and we are waiting to see what the landscape will look like and if/when schools may be comfortable to put on events/see visitors in schools in the future. All of our marketing activity and the work of the careermakers aims to put people on a pathway of information gathering. To keep those interested in careers in racing we aim to keep in contact and support people via regular communications to our database of c7000. The target being to eventually support them towards, work experience training or employment. Part of this is opportunities for face to face contact and support and for this we created experiential events called Explore Racing Days. These are promoted to enable individuals, families and community groups to hear in depth information about career opportunities and see behind the scenes of a training provider/yard/racecourse. In 2019 we held 3 Explore Racing Events for 155 people. These included individuals, families and community groups such as Ebony, Urban Equestrian, Ride High, Gloucester City Farm, Active Communities Network. Who: We target schools, careers advisors, community group leaders and school age children.