Work is no longer something young people are simply “prepared for” after school or university. It is something they are already stepping into, experimenting with, and reshaping in real time.
Yet there is a growing gap between potential and pathway.
Across many emerging economies, including ours, young people are highly curious, digitally fluent, and increasingly entrepreneurial in mindset. But curiosity alone is not enough. Without structured exposure to real problems, real tools, and real environments where ideas can be tested, that potential often remains fragmented.
This is the gap the NextGen Anchors program is designed to address.
At its core, NextGen Anchors is not about producing “job-ready graduates” in the traditional sense. It is about developing adaptable thinkers, young people who can observe problems, interrogate systems, prototype solutions, and communicate ideas with clarity and confidence.
That distinction matters more than ever.
We are moving further away from linear career paths and closer to ecosystems of work, where individuals will likely shift across roles, industries, and even identities of work multiple times in their lifetime. In that reality, the most valuable capability is not memorisation or compliance, but the ability to learn, unlearn, and rebuild quickly.
Programs like NextGen Anchors sit at this intersection: between education and real-world application, between curiosity and execution.
What we are seeing through the program is skill development coupled with mindset formation.
Young participants begin by asking “what can I do in tech, design, or business?” but quickly move to deeper questions:
- “What problems actually matter in my context?”
- “Who am I building for?”
- “How do I test whether this idea is real or just interesting?”
These are not academic questions, but founder, builder, and systems-thinking questions. And perhaps most importantly, they are questions that cannot be answered in isolation or theory alone. They require exposure to people, environments, constraints, and feedback.
A young person can have the same talent in two different contexts and produce entirely different outcomes depending on what they are exposed to, what they are encouraged to attempt, and what they are allowed to fail at safely. If we are serious about building competitive economies, we cannot only focus on importing skills frameworks or replicating external models. We have to design systems that reflect our own realities, our infrastructure constraints, our market behaviours, and our unique opportunity landscape.
That means rethinking how early talent is developed:
- Less passive learning, more active building
- Less theoretical abstraction, more real-world iteration
- Less siloed skill training, more cross-functional problem solving
Programs like NextGen Anchors are small interventions in that larger shift. What we are ultimately trying to build is not just a pipeline of talent, but a generation that is comfortable operating in ambiguity, capable of seeing constraints not as barriers, but as design inputs. And in that sense, the real outcome is not the projects they complete during the program.
It is the way they begin to think after it. That is the long game.
