Goldman opens trading floor for students to promote social mobility

GOLDMAN SACHS has teamed up with Queen Mary University of London to train apprentices directly on its trading floor to boost social diversity in the financial sector.

Expected to start in September next year, the programme provides students with paid on-the-job training with study over four years.

It offers students a chance to gain hands-on experience in a sector still struggling to attract candidates from less-affluent backgrounds, a Guardian report said.

While the scheme, believed to be the first of its kind in the UK, is open to students of all educational backgrounds, its focus will be on candidates from state education.

In addition to salaries, selected candidates will also be eligible for a bonus from the American investment bank and financial services company.

It will pay for relocation and books and laptops of the trainees, who will also study at Queen Mary’s school of economics and finance for two one-week “teaching sprints” per semester.

The scheme comes after a KPMG study in 2019 found that 41 per cent of people working in finance had their parents in the same sector, raising concerns about a lack of access to top-level roles for less-privileged people.

Goldman’s managing director in global markets, Daniel Freckleton, said the industry was not doing enough to attract students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds.

“There is, of course, an interplay between socio-economic background and ethnic minorities, so working to improve social mobility in our recruitment process is likely to have knock-on benefits to our racial diversity too,” Freckleton, who is the main sponsor of the apprenticeship scheme, told the newspaper.

“We want to attract the brightest and best students from as diverse a talent pool as possible – that’s a diversity of socio-economic background as much as anything else.

“Unfortunately, we’re currently missing out on a lot of this talent, either because students are put off by the traditional recruitment process, the financial barriers of university study, or simply because they are not aware of the kinds of jobs that Goldman has to offer them,” he said.