Chatting with Colin, our General Manager

Our General Manager, Colin, often spends his time working behind the scenes, and only occasionally gets involved in school visits or delivering sessions, so he is less well known to our participants than some members of the team! We sat down with him to find out why he took on the role, what his job involves, and what he sees coming up for Altitude Foundation.

You have worked at Altitude Foundation since 2019, when the charity was first established. What interested you in the job?

Social mobility is my driving passion: I’ve always believed that education can be the most powerful tool for enabling young people to fulfil their aspirations and achieve amazing things. Combining that with a fast moving sector like tech, which has changed so much even just since the Foundation was established, seemed like such an exciting opportunity.

Getting the charity started as its first (and, for a while, only!) employee could have seemed like a daunting task, but I really welcomed the chance to take all of my previous experience and use it to fill a really important niche. I was really fortunate, and still am, to have a great team of trustees that set the strategic direction and provide me with support to do my job.

What does your job look like, day to day?

Being a General Manager in a small organisation means being prepared to get involved in everything. I first got started in education outreach because I enjoy working with young people, but these days, I’m more likely to be sat at my desk dealing with the background admin: it’s just how it goes! That means I can be dealing with the charity’s fundraising and finances, sorting out important compliance issues like insurance or data protection, building links with employers, or supporting the work of the Board of Trustees.

However, the bit of my job I enjoy the best is anything that focuses directly on the young people we support: whether it’s discussing session design, supporting individual participants, or getting out to run a session, remembering why we do what we do keeps me going!

What is coming next for Altitude Foundation?

We’ve made some really bold and exciting decisions about a new way to deliver our programme, which we’re hoping will enable us to work with more and more young people over the course of the next three years. However, our focus will remain the same, and we’ll continue to deliver quality-first, high impact activities, including the events our partners and pupils are all familiar with.

Now that AI is the thing that everyone’s talking about, it could be easy to think that opportunities for young people to move into tech careers will reduce or become harder to access. But I don’t believe that will be the case: we’ll need talented, highly skilled people coming into the tech sector more than ever before, and we want to be a part of making sure that they come from as socioeconomically diverse a set of backgrounds as possible.