Inverness-based entrepreneur opens doors for young people

It’s a truth almost universally acknowledged that now is a difficult time to be a young person. Between high rents, rising living costs, and growing mental health pressures (exacerbated by social media), it is increasingly hard for them to build a stable foundation for adulthood.

Recent reporting put youth unemployment at 16.1% in late 2025, compared with 5.1% overall, a stark gap highlighting how those on the bottom rung of the career ladder often suffer most in the UK’s weak jobs market.

More than 1 million young people (aged 16-24) are currently classed as ‘NEET’, not in education, employment or training. And for those youngsters living in Scotland’s more remote or rural communities, things may be even trickier, with fewer local jobs, weaker transport links, and less access to training or support.

But amid all this doom and gloom, there is one shining beacon of hope – in the shape of 58-year-old David Massey. The Inverness-based entrepreneur has made it his mission to provide meaningful employment opportunities for young people in the IT sector through his firm WePurpose Technology.

Born in the north-east of England, Massey’s determination to open doors for young people was driven by his own difficulties trying to break into the IT industry.

“I’d always wanted to work in technology,” he explains, “since I got my first computer at the age of 12.” Yet despite having served in the RAF, and latterly working in a software development role within the forces, he encountered “many barriers” preventing him getting employment in the industry.

“I didn’t have a degree, and employers tended towards graduates. There was also a perception that having been in the RAF I was used to a very dictatorial management structure. But in any business, people are given an authority to be able to make decisions within their remit, and the forces are no different.”

Eventually Massey was given a start in the industry by “someone who saw something in me”, as he puts it, where he was then able to build a career in cyber security. In 2016, he decided to launch his own business, The Apprentice Store, helping businesses design and implement IT systems to suit their needs.

Yet for Massey, building a successful business wasn’t enough. He wanted to ensure he could also offer job opportunities to those who might be getting overlooked.

“I started it as a social enterprise, to create sustainable employment for young people who faced barriers of entering the workforce. Our first apprentice, Matthew, he didn’t engage at school and left with no qualifications. He came and worked with us, then after six years he went on to another job.

“He’s now got eight and a half years’ worth of IT sector experience that he probably otherwise wouldn’t, and it’s hard to know what he would have been doing without that. He’s had the initial opportunity, but we also helped him to obtain a degree. And that degree gives him a huge amount of confidence on his ability.”

But how does WePurpose Technology work? Essentially, Massey provides businesses with access to an apprentice, without them having to take someone on full-time.

“Small businesses typically don’t have a long-term, full-time need for a digital apprentice. They also tend to want someone who is multi-discipline: cyber specialists, web development, social media and marketing. There’s lots of things that they want their apprentice to do, but they can’t get an apprenticeship framework that allows them to do all of that. So our value proposition, to small businesses, is to be the ‘Apprentice Store’ (our former name) that fulfils their needs.”

This relationship of mutual benefit has clearly been an effective one.

“As an organisation we have employed 26 people into the IT sector,” Massey explains, “who I believe that, without that opportunity, probably wouldn’t have been able to get a foothold into the industry.”

And after a decade of successful business, he decided to rebrand the Apprentice Store to WePurpose Technology earlier this year, in a bid to help drive growth. But while Massey is making an admirable difference to the young people he helps, he is keen to stress that more needs to be done at a national level.

“Academic barriers are still an issue, as they were for me, but I think today we’ve got a whole set of other barriers. We’ve got a young workforce that is being badly impacted mentally. Anxiety is quite a common word that gets used. The generation that are coming into the workplace now were those that were in education through the pandemic.

“They typically haven’t had those part time roles in retail or hospitality, which is where most people get their first job, so they’ve not got experience of the workplace – and that then fuels the anxiety.”

“There is a societal problem around the idea that having a low paid job is worse than no job at all. I think we need to address that. We need to encourage young people to take up those opportunities and more importantly, for employers to give those opportunities to young people.”

Because in a labour market stacked against them, it is not potential young people lack – it’s the chance to prove it.

Source: The Herald