The Young and the Restless

I'm going to post a series of thoughts around growing our population, and I'd really like to get your feedback. Brandon recruits businesses, but we don't actively recruit people. If we're going to get to 70,000, we need to think about the people behind the businesses.

In today's post, I'd like to look at recruitment and retention of our young, unmarried, newly graduated 20-29 year olds.

We say we want to keep our young people in Brandon To do that we're going to need to offer the employment opportunities and the lifestyle that they are looking for. There is a lot of research that says that once they're gone, they're gone for good. Despite popular mythology, they rarely return in their thirties to settle down and start families. So, how do we keep them?

We have about three thousand students at BU and ACC who are, in effect, test driving Brandon. In addition, there are 20-29 year olds who are working, attending the Fire College, etc. Even big cities like Philadelphia are trying to match young people with local jobs and proactively are working to improve their city in order to retain or attract young people. Brandon should also be proactive.

Part of the environment we need to create or reinforce:
Great Career Opportunities

• The institutions do graduate surveys to find out where their alumni are and what they're doing. Could the City insert a question into the survey that asked why they left? What we could do to be more attractive to young people?
• Does the City look at cluster theory for economic development? (geographic concentrations of interconnected companies, specialized suppliers, service providers, firms in related industries, associated institutions such as education or regulatory bodies.) Are our "clusters" recruiting? Are they offering entry level positions for newly minted graduates? Are the "clusters" attractive to young people such as new media, arts, environment?
  
• Brandon should be proactively building a culture of entrepreneurship.

Lifestyle

• What opportunities does Brandon offer for gregarious, socially outgoing young people? Beyond bars and nightclubs, what else is there to do? A national poll asked young graduates 20-29 to rank their favorite Canadian cities to live in. Top were Calgary, Ottawa, Victoria, Edmonton, and Guelph. Why? Arts and culture, affordability, good restaurants, lively places to hang out, and diversity were all listed as desirable characteristics.
  

Obviously, there is a lot of potential here that deserves more than a brief blog and lip service. All plans should be built on data- so let's go get some and then start building the plan!