The bottom line: Digital solutions to unemployment

My journey began 23 years ago when I was 15 years old and living in a poor community in Manchester. It's a place of high unemployment and lack of opportunity. I knew I had to leave school at 16 because my family couldn't afford for me to go to college and I had to try and get work.

I visited careers advisor at my school and, before I even spoke, he said 'for people like you who drop out of education and come from where you live these, are your opportunities'. The options he offered me were retail and construction and nothing else. These are good industries and career options, but I felt my future was in a different place.

Asking what I wanted to do, I said 'I think one day everybody in the world will have a computer, every business will have a computer and the whole world will be connected in a way that's never been done before'. This was 23 years ago when computers were big machines and the careers advisor looked at me as if to say 'how can you think you'll be part of this with no education'. So I left school with no support and became what we now call NEET (Not in Education, Employment and Training).

I knew if I was going to have the career I aspired to I would have to help myself, so I learned basic computer skills and eventually found a small business that looked beyond my dropping out of education at 16 to take me on for a two year apprenticeship linked to what was then a government programme called YTS (Youth Training Scheme). Within three months I was taken off the apprenticeship and made a full-time employee.

Seven years later, in 1994, I co-founded one of the UK's first internet marketing companies and spent the next ten years working with large technology companies globally, helping them sell their products and services. However, I knew the systemic barriers that blocked my way out of poverty when I was 16 were still there so decided to leave the corporate sector and create a new type of business – one that would focus its growth on helping people out of unemployment and poverty. That was five years ago.

And that's where we are today. Modernising the third sector with next generation Cloud Computing IT solutions and running six month IT employment and training programmes for unemployed people with Whitebox Digital. Right now we're very excited to be linking with the government on the Future Jobs Fund and, by March 2010, we'll be employing and training 240 people across 17 towns and cities in the UK.

We're setting people free from systemic barriers to have the careers they were told would never happen, just like I was told 23 years ago.