Pioneering Education Initiative Wins AJ100 Award 

Building My Skills, a Ryder Architecture founded initiative which seeks to better prepare students for the workplace, was awarded Community Impact of the Year during the 2020 AJ100 festival. 

Building My Skills (BMS), now in its tenth year, teaches transferable skills through a range of business focused lessons.  The free programme involves five sessions including finance, interview techniques and online presence across the academic year, culminating in a day of mock interviews.  Each session is delivered by professionals from a range of diverse sectors.   

In the last academic year, the programme engaged with over 9,400 students from 54 schools, with 120 business partners involved in total over the past decade. 

Ryder, alongside Esh Group, Arup and Turner & Townsend, is a founding partner of BMS.   

Mark Thompson, managing partner at Ryder, said, “Ryder has always been passionately committed to supporting the education of the communities in which we work including the next generation of construction professionals through initiatives such as Building My Skills and PlanBEE (Built Environment Education).  Winning this award demonstrates the significant benefit the initiative brings to young people.  We look forward to seeing what the next ten years holds for students of the programme.” 

Aaron Young, associate and schools engagement lead at Ryder, said, “We are delighted to win this award.  It is a testament to the benefits provided to local schools and its communities.  We’ve received extremely positive feedback from students, parents and companies involved in Building My Skills and to receive national recognition from the Architect’s Journal is fantastic.” 

The AJ100 judges commented, “[The practice has] demonstrated a genuine long term commitment for improving opportunities for young people by engaging with the education system in an effort to bring about positive change.  With its project partners, the practice has taken an idea and grown it over a long period of time to reach thousands of young people every year in the north east and has ambitions to expand that into other regions in the future.” 

‘Retail reimagined: The new era for customer experience’, Periscopes for McKinsey, August 2020