Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • I'm joined today by Max Kaupp-Roberts, who is 23 years old

  • and began a career in the city of London only to abandon it

  • I'm here to talk to him about how the Brexit vote has affected his peer group

  • here in the middle of London's financial center

  • Max, when you decided to leave a career in the city, what was your main motivation at the time for moving on?

  • Really, the main thing for me was I didn't find the work really interesting enough

  • for me to want to pursue it in the long term

  • Do you think talking to your friends who are still in the city, that this decision to leave the EU

  • will affect whether they stay in their jobs?

  • Worries I think are kinda twofold. One is whether or not the job will even be there

  • so just worries that banks may be moving positions over to Frankfurt, Paris, Dublin, potentially

  • so there's the question of whether their job will even remain in London at all

  • and then the second thing is whether or not London will remain being a city

  • where they can A, you know, live the way they want to, not needing a visa,

  • and being able to settle there, plan their life for the long term

  • and the other being whether or not London will lose some of its dynamism in a place that makes it exciting to live

  • so if the economy starts to go downhill in the UK, potentially, whether or not that will have

  • negative repercussions on their quality of life here in London

  • Do you think that these benefits that you and your peer group here in London see of EU membership,

  • the freedom to travel abroad to study, the freedom to work abroad,

  • the freedom to work alongside other EU nationals in your former office

  • Do you think that sort of perception is shared by young people across the UK or not?

  • It's very hard for me to judge that

  • I think ultimately, when you're in London, you work among so many people from all over the world

  • You come here, and you know so many people who have moved abroad as well

  • that those benefits are very apparent. They're really obvious. You know plenty of people who've worked in Germany,

  • worked in Spain and France, wherever, and many of your friends will also be French or German or Spanish or Greek, whoever,

  • so it's very clear that there are these tangible benefits, opportunities that you can take

  • you know, a lot of people have studied abroad as well, maybe have had a semester abroad or a term abroad

  • Through the ERASMUS program, I think if you were living in a more marginalized community

  • maybe in the more deprived parts of the country then you may not know anybody who's been able to

  • take advantage of the benefits. You may not even conceive that as a possibility for you

  • then it's easy to see why you might not see the benefits of EU membership in the same way I saw in London

  • In your very interesting piece that you wrote for the FT in May, you quoted the Deloitte study

  • which said that a really significant proportion of millennials were already thinking that

  • they wouldn't stand their job beyond two years,

  • and certainly very few of them thinking they would stay beyond five years

  • Do you think the Brexit vote will change that sort of time horizon, that sort of loyalty to the job that they're in?

  • I think it's probably going to even more accelerate the short time horizon that people could be looking at

  • Most of my peers at the time, and as was kind of proven in the study as well,

  • were very much thinking of leaving the job within the next few years

  • I think now with the Brexit situation as well, a lot of people who thought they might stay in London

  • may be moved to another job within London, are now more

  • considering whether or not they have to go back to their family home originally and kind of make a career for themselves there

  • Max, thank you very much for being with us today, and sharing your insights into

  • how your generation sees this great Brexit decision

  • It's great to have a captive millennial on the FT sofa

  • Thank you very much for having me. It's been a pleasure

I'm joined today by Max Kaupp-Roberts, who is 23 years old

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it