Why do you work Mummy?

Most of us work because we need to. We have bills to

pay, mortgages or rent to cover, and hopefully enough left over to enjoy time with the people we love. For many of us, work is also about providing for our families, whether that's our children, our parents or those who depend on us.

But when I think about the future, I find myself thinking less about my own career and more about daughter's, my nieces and nephews.

I'd love for them to grow up believing that work is about creating, contributing and solving problems. But I also wonder what opportunities will exist by the time they are entering the workplace.

The graduate roles and entry-level jobs that have traditionally been the first step into a career are already beginning to change. AI and automation are transforming the work that once helped young people build confidence, customer service skills, resilience, time management and financial independence. Even the weekend and holiday jobs that many of us relied on as teenagers are becoming less common. And that worries me.

Not because technology is bad. I genuinely believe AI will create incredible opportunities. But we have to be intentional about making sure it creates opportunities for everyone, not just efficiency for organisations.

One of my long-term ambitions is to build organisations, businesses and ecosystems that create meaningful opportunities for young people. Places where they can develop skills, gain confidence and discover what they're capable of.

And there is another challenge running alongside this.

As a society, we're much better at recognising neurodiversity than we were when I was growing up. I can still picture children at school who were simply labelled "the naughty kid". Today, many of those children might be recognised as having ADHD, autism or another neurodivergent profile. We'd understand that alongside the challenges came incredible strengths.

That is real progress, but recognition isn't enough.

We also need workplaces that are designed to help those strengths thrive. We need leaders who understand different ways of thinking, managers who know how to coach rather than judge, and organisations that see difference as capability, not complication.

The number of traditional entry points into work may be shrinking, just as the diversity of needs, talents and ways of working is becoming more visible than ever before.

The organisations that succeed won't simply be the ones that adopt AI fastest, they'll be the ones that create opportunities for the next generation and build workplaces where every kind of talent has the chance to flourish.

That's the kind of future I want to help create. And if I get it right, maybe one day daughter and her cousins will have the opportunity to be part of it too.