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We Job Box at Connected Britain 2026: What does a CV not tell you?
We Job Box founder Lalita Taylor took to the stage at Connected Britain 2026 to explore a question that sits at the heart of early careers and recruitment:
How do you get experience when you need experience to get experience?
Drawing on We Job Box’s work with young people and employers, Lalita shared what we’ve learned from creating more than 12,500 hours of work experience — and how those lessons are shaping the next stage of We Job Box.
At the centre of the talk was a simple idea: if we rely too heavily on previous experience to identify potential, we risk overlooking people who simply haven’t had their first opportunity yet.
Watch Lalita’s Connected Britain talk below.
We started by listening
We Job Box didn’t begin with technology.
We began by listening to young people and employers and understanding the barriers that can make it difficult to access that first meaningful experience of work.
Our early proof of concept brought together 500 young people across five sectors and more than 40 employers, with the work independently evaluated by Aston University.
What we heard from young people was clear.
They wanted to understand what work actually looked like. They wanted to meet employers, understand what employers were looking for and, importantly, have the opportunity to actually do something.
That learning became the foundation for what came next.
Creating real opportunities to demonstrate skills
Through our government-funded Digital Futures work, We Job Box developed Microjobs — real tasks provided by real employers that gave participants the opportunity to use their skills and produce something meaningful.
The principle was simple.
Instead of only telling someone how to prepare for work, give them an opportunity to experience it.
Microjobs then developed into Mini-internships, giving participants more time with employers and the opportunity to work on larger, real-world business challenges.
Across our work, we’ve now created approximately 12,500 hours of work experience.
But we also discovered that experience itself was only part of the value.
Participants were developing skills and confidence while gaining something that can be much harder to access: relationships with employers, professional conversations and networks.
In other words, they were building professional social capital.
What happens when employers can see capability?
We developed this approach further with students from the University of Surrey and employers at Surrey Research Park.
Students worked on genuine business challenges, researching problems, collaborating, developing solutions and presenting their thinking directly to employers.
This gave employers something a CV alone cannot always provide: an opportunity to see someone’s capabilities first-hand.
The results were encouraging:
It led us to think differently about one of the questions at the centre of recruitment.
Alongside asking:
“What has this person done?”
What happens if we also ask:
“What can this person do?”
What does a CV not tell you?
A CV is important. Qualifications and previous experience matter.
But they don’t necessarily tell us everything about a person.
They may not show how somebody approaches a new problem, how curious they are, how they communicate, how quickly they learn or what they could achieve if they were given the opportunity.
That creates an important question for employers:
Who might we be missing?
It is also one of the questions shaping what we are building next.
The next stage of We Job Box
We Job Box is developing an AI-enabled skills-matching platform that connects people with opportunities based on their skills, interests and potential — not simply the job titles already on their CV.
For individuals, the aim is to make it easier to discover jobs, work experience and other opportunities where their abilities could be valuable.
For employers, it creates another way to discover talent they might otherwise miss.
And for schools, colleges, universities and organisations supporting people into employment, it can create stronger connections between the people they support and meaningful employer opportunities.
AI helps us make those connections at greater scale.
But AI isn’t the point. Better matching is.
Can we help someone discover an opportunity they might not normally find?
Can we help an employer discover someone they might normally miss?
That’s what we’re building towards.
Come and test We Job Box
Connected Britain was an opportunity to share what we’ve learned so far.
Now we want more employers and partners to help us test what comes next.
If you’re an employer or recruiter, bring us an opportunity and help us test our approach to skills matching.
If you work in a school, college or university, talk to us about connecting the people you support with meaningful employer opportunities.
And if you work in government, employability or a service provider, we’d like to hear about the barriers you’re seeing and the people you support.
We Job Box started by listening to young people and employers.
As we build what comes next, we’re going to keep listening.
Turning potential into proof — and proof into opportunity.