Nathaniel Diong On Connecting Next Generation Talent With Authentic Mentorship And Employment Opportunities

Growing up as a young disabled migrant, Nathaniel felt trapped without opportunities to join the workforce.

Today, Nathaniel Diong is the founder & CEO of Future Minds Network, a social enterprise that empowers marginalised youth with the future-ready skills to enter employment, and even create their own jobs. Students have launched 3D-printing businesses, led charities uplifting 10,000 elderly residents, and even discovered their dream careers in social change.

To date, Future Minds has partnered with governments, corporates and universities worldwide to deliver over 30,000 hours of employment training and support.

Nathaniel’s work has been featured on international news, including SBS World News, China Daily, The Star, as well as The Age Herald Sun. He has been recognised as finalist for 2023 Commonwealth Young Person of the Year, Young Australian of the Year, and celebrated as Asia’s most influential entrepreneurs in Forbes 30 under 30."

Nathaniel discusses empowering future generations through authentic mentorship to build sustainable, fulfilling livelihoods and opportunities for diverse communities to collaborate and drive the growth of the business for good movement.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work in education and empowering communities?

[Nathaniel Diong] - I come from a family of immigrants, and so I'd watched my parents from a very early age work multiple jobs to provide for us and make ends meet. My parents only had three rules for us: don't do drugs, don't get in with the wrong crowd and finish our educations. Early on, this importance of education was drilled into me.

By the time I was 16 I'd begun struggling in school, and I was so overwhelmed that I would never make it out. I didn't know what I wanted to do, and I felt this deep sense of terror for my future, until one day everything changed… I'm just kidding! There wasn't this one big moment, but there was a moment, and as someone who hated school, I remember I would take every opportunity I could to get out of school.

One day, there was this excursion that popped up, and I remember walking into this room full of adults as a fresh faced 16-year-old. In the room, there were qualified doctors, engineers, and software developers, and in 48 hours, they were going to try and solve the healthcare crisis.

I was awe struck by their ability to turn an idea into reality, to problem solve, ideate, and innovate. That was my first ever hackathon, and that day I learned more than I learned in that entire year of school.

I started to think to myself, “why don't we have these in our classrooms?” At 16, I decided I would run a hackathon, with one hundred people across five schools. I also did it for free, just to make it a little bit harder for myself! This was where the Future Minds Network was born, and that's really where my story began. I was trying to get out of school and struggled with knowing that education is important.

I felt this deep sense of fear that I wasn't prepared for the future, and I didn't know where the future would take me. I've been lucky enough now over the years to have continued to scale our programs across Australia to solve that problem that I faced. I want to give young people a second chance to learn the skills they need to face a future that doesn't make sense right now.

As the founder and CEO of Future Minds Network, can you share more about this organisation's values, purpose and the impact you're generating?

In a nutshell, Future Minds supports disadvantaged youth to learn job ready skills. We help them build real world projects with industry mentors and transition into work, and we do this by delivering innovative education and training programs.

Since 2018, we've supported over 350 young Australians to navigate pathways in higher education and employment. We've re-skilled 11,000 young people through leadership programs, workshops, and project-based hackathons.

What I'm most proud of is our alumni stay with us for five years or more, and this means they continue to re-engage, land internships, find jobs and even get advice on how to build their own businesses and social enterprises.

We continue to be an entirely youth led organisation, and we’re strong believers in nothing about us, without us. We're intentional about how we try to listen and learn from lived experiences. One of the things we find is some kids are doing it tough, and some kids aren't.

Our work is designed to realise that education isn't a one size fits all system, and that every young person and organisation we work with is different.

Why should mainstream businesses also consider prioritising diversity and what long term systemic impacts can this create?

There are so many reasons why. Firstly, it’s the right thing to do. We all want to live in a world where disadvantage isn’t the barrier holding us back. Regardless of our background, all of us can access equal opportunity to thrive. There's a social responsibility each of us holds to care and look out for each other; to realise we all have our own unique strengths we bring to the table.

The ‘sexier’ part people like to hear about is there is also a business case for it. We know that more diverse teams bring different perspectives, unlocking the ability for innovation to flourish. There are mountains of research showing companies of diverse leadership lead to better financial outcomes.

We know that when we understand more diverse markets, we're effectively able to serve broader audiences and customer bases while designing better solutions that are fit for the purposes of communities.

It's such a powerful mechanism, we can start looking at diversity as a lever which allows us to influence positive outcomes. This is rather than just being a checkbox exercise to make sure our businesses are meeting their social responsibilities. There's so much value that can come out of looking at where diversity can strengthen our organisations.

One of the things I have been interested in is when we think about diversity, our first point of call is often cultural, gender, or socioeconomic diversity. Whilst those are all pertinent and important, one thing we sometimes forget is that age diversity is a powerful factor too. Something we're seeing increasingly is there are huge shifts in workforce behaviours, dynamics, and trends right now.

One of the biggest things we're seeing is that 40% of our global workforce will be from Generation Z by 2030. Think about that, 40%. Almost half of our workforce will comprise of young people who have intersectional experiences, those who are culturally or gender diverse people.

There is a huge piece of work that's being untapped here, and we're seeing generational divides continue to grow. A lot of us aren't seeing eye to eye, and we're all growing up in different environments. We're seeing Generation Z become one of the most technologically adept generations to date after growing up without knowing what a world would look like without the internet or mobile phones.

It's a completely different dynamic, and I think the more we can focus on our generational strengths and bringing people together rather than thinking about our differences, the more we can accelerate innovation and change. We need to start thinking about diversity in all its forms, not just in the traditional sense we've often seen in the past.

How can individuals and organisations meaningfully invest in younger generations and what unique barriers does this generation face to lifelong success?

You're asking me a question the world's been trying to solve for many years now. There are some easy and hard ways, so I'll start off with the easier steps with a lower barrier to entry. The meaningful engagement of younger generations can mean very different things to people, because every young person is experiencing different issues and environments.

Fundamentally, a lot of young people are seeking opportunities for mentorship and guidance, and I think there's a real opportunity for organisations to do this in a different way.

Often, when I say mentorship while talking to organisations, their first point of call is to get a senior manager to work with a junior associate and help guide them up the corporate ladder.

Whilst that is great in some scenarios that's not what I mean by mentorship. What I mean by mentorship and guidance are real relationships between humans, where they're learning from each other, sharing challenges and they realise that there's knowledge to be gleaned from both sides. It's reverse mentorship if you will, some people like to call it that.

I like to call it a two-way street, because there's so much we can learn from sitting down and saying, “we both are coming from very different places. We've grown up in different generations and used different technology and tools, so what can we learn from each other? What limiting beliefs are you having right now? How can we tackle those together?”

There is a real opportunity for organisations to look at a meaningful approach to making those conversations to happen, conversations not purely focused on performance reviews or choosing new strategies going forward. We can meaningfully invest in people as humans and for their growth.

The second thing I think organisations can do is offer both educational opportunities and opportunities to fail. What’s powerful is the next generation values autonomy. We see that within the research, the top three things young people are looking for [are] an ability to find purpose and meaning in their work, flexibility and autonomy over their schedules, and wellbeing that positions mental health at the forefront.

There are movements where young people want the opportunity to be able to shape their work and not feel like sheep, where they have an active voice in shaping their jobs.

The reason I mentioned failure is we often look at failure as a bad thing, but I think early on the more we encourage failure, the more we encourage great ideas to grow. Failure is just a learning opportunity. When you look at the acronym of F.A.I.L, I always like to say it is the First Attempt In Learning.

The more we give opportunities for younger generations to experiment with things that might not work or do tasks they might not feel confident with, the more we are able to walk alongside them and guide them through that journey.

This can be transformative for not just that young person, but for that organisation as well, because you're now getting a vested interest from that young person to want to stay with your company, because they feel trusted and like they're able to bring fresh ideas to the company; they’re not just a cog in the wheel.

The harder ways of making a difference are systemic changes, things like looking at how we can create inclusive work environments. That's not something that I can solve in five minutes unfortunately! There are so many steps we can start to take, and a lot of the work we've been doing was from when we first started.

We thought to ourselves that the solution to youth unemployment was to upskill young people, and that makes sense. When you think about it, if young people can't get into jobs, it must be because they don't have the skills to get into the jobs. For many cases, this is mostly right.

The other side we don't often see is employers aren't ready to employ young people, because we're living in a future we don't understand. A huge statistic we see is that two thirds of businesses right now are struggling to find the right talent they need, people who have the skills to face the future. This is because nobody knows what we need to face the future.

The other side of the picture we realised was if we want to get young people into jobs, we can't just work with young people, we need to also work with employers to understand how to work with young people, and to work with employers to understand the future of work.

There's real potential for us to think about what change looks like when we're working on both sides of the spectrum, and I guess this is an invitation to organisations who are listening to this podcast to contact me. If you're struggling to understand your Gen Z talent or how you can give them the best mentorship opportunities to learn and grow, I'd love to chat with you and explore how this looks. I don't think that enough people are having this conversation, but it is a two-way street.

It isn't just about upskilling young people, because even in a perfect scenario, let's just say we train up a talent pool of 10,000 incredible young people. If the businesses are not able to keep up, then we don't have any jobs. The problem then never becomes solved; we still have 10,000 incredible young people with zero jobs. They're still unemployed, and so if we want to solve this larger issue employment, we must think about both sides of the spectrum.

As an upcoming participant in the AMP Foundation Spark program, what are you looking forward to and hoping to gain in experience and learnings?

What excites me most about programs like this is the community you meet. One of the biggest learnings I had as a founder was that you're never too big or too small to ask for help, and that's something I forgot along the way.

This journey of starting your own business or social enterprise can be very lonely, so having the right community around you who relates to your struggles, understands your challenges, and who you can seek support from is what excites me the most.

Having an opportunity to refresh is what I'm excited for, because often in this space we can get very caught up in thinking we already have the right solutions or ideas. There must be points within the business where you say, "we've been doing it this this way for a long time, but how can we reinvent the wheel? How can we reassess whether this is going well and potentially go into another direction?"

This is the same phase I went through when I shared earlier, we decided to move from “let's upskill young people,” to, “let's also upskill employers,” because that's a big issue. With the Spark program, one of the things I'm excited about is we're trialling a new idea called the Young Artist Centre. We've already done our first pilot where we've worked with 30 young artists to start their own small businesses, and so they've created everything from handmade jewellery to woodworks and organic honey.

Over a period of 12 months, we walked them through everything they needed to know from how do you do sales and negotiation? How do you create your own new product? How do you market your business? It was just extraordinary to see them transition from having very low confidence in their ability to create a business and saying, "this is just a passion project or a hobby,” to then be able to stand in front of hundreds of customers and say, "I would love to share what I've built with you. I want you to see what I have in store.”

This transformation is what we want to continue exploring in AMP Spark and see how we can continue to scale our impact and bring it to new geographic regions.

What is required to mainstream the business for good movement and make it the new normal in the future?

First and foremost, we need collaboration and partnerships. Impact Boom is doing it well, so kudos to you and the team for bringing people together.

We need to encourage collaboration more between businesses, NFPs, social enterprise, and (particularly) government and academia. Working with a lot of schools and universities, I see this almost reluctance to connect in the sector.

Even in this climate, there is still difficulty to understand where social enterprise fits, whether it’s a traditional business for good movement, as we like to call it, or whether it is still just a non-for-profit idea.

There’s a big awareness piece we're still working on, and it’s not necessarily that people don't want to work with business for good, but rather it's such a bizarre idea for people to process. People ask, "why would you do both, why would you not just create business and make profits or start a charity and be broke for the rest of your life to do good?" People can't understand business for good is a model that works. It's a model that means we can make profit and purpose together.

Awareness is the number one priority, and there's still a lot of work for us to do there. Collaboration is number two, and it's not that people don't want to collaborate, but it's people don't understand why we are so optimistic about what the future can look like.

The last thing is investment, investment in social enterprises, in business for good, and in models we might not understand yet. There is still a huge lack of financial support for businesses that do go down this pathway of prioritising social impact. We see this even in my own work, over the years we've become a bit of a one stop shop for young people who want to start a social enterprise.

Now we have cohorts of young people who are knocking on our door saying, “we want to start a business for good,” but we don't have the capacity to service them. There needs to be more investment from philanthropy, government, and a systems lens for us to continue supporting people who are doing good work.

This investment needs to start early, because one thing about the Australian government which has always been very interesting is we love to back people when they're successful, growing and huge, but our risk tolerance is very low. We see this across the board, we're known to be a country that takes very little risks, and when we do take risks, there's a lot of backlashes.

I would encourage philanthropists and members of government to back young people and emerging social enterprises. Back businesses who are on that pathway for good, but might not be there yet, because the more we encourage our ecosystem with financing, the more we're going to see a booming sector that's going to succeed.

This is a call to action, there's so much potential in the sector for better to be created, but we need to take more risks and back people early. We can't wait until they're multi-million-dollar social enterprises to want a piece of that pie, because then it's too late.

At the end of the day, if we do just do that, we miss out on so many other opportunities that could have been if we had a better environment for us to grow. It's an encouragement to those listening to investigate emerging social enterprises and how you can back our capacity for building, scaling our programs and taking bigger and better risks.

Look at what Impact Boom is building and all the amazing stuff they've been doing, while you're definitely not an ‘emerging’ social enterprise like mine, I know there are so many areas of your work that might be developing or in the works that would be able to achieve so much more impact if you had more investors and supporters on board.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across creating a positive change?

Local Transit Co. is an incredible social enterprise, and they provide accessible transport to different communities across Victoria. They employ marginalised and migrant taxi drivers to deliver their services and get people across the state. They also have transport services for people living with a disability, and they're working on some exciting projects I probably can't disclose yet. They're an amazing transport social enterprise you should check out.

Raise Our Voice Australia are an incredible social enterprise working to get the voices of young women into policy. They run an amazing initiative once every year called Youth Voice in Parliament, where they collect responses from young people across Australia who want to re-imagine a brighter future for Australia. They get MPs from across the nation to read out their speeches and share their bold visions in Parliament.

We need to create a directory website for social enterprise, and I would love if anybody were interested in some of these emerging social enterprises and connecting with them to reach out to me. I'd love to put you in touch with people, and if you want to invest in the next generations of social entrepreneurs, also reach out to me. We have so many young people who are doing amazing things, young people who just need to meet the right people before they can continue to scale their impacts and turn their small ideas into reality.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

There are cool resources we've been able to create over the years.

Back in 2021, we decided to map every youth led organisation across Australia, so we sat down and mapped 120 youth organisations to look at how we can collaborate better? To collaborate, we need to know who is in the space, and nobody is working on that now.

That's a cool resource you should check out. We have lists of books and resources you can access if you're an emerging social entrepreneur, and we also have a community of global changemakers. One of my favourites is Atomic Habits, I know I'm cliche and basic, but it's a great book, I love it!

Another book I've started reading is Never Split the Difference, and I appreciate the way they talk about negotiation. Negotiation skills are important for any founder or social entrepreneur to have, because we often come into this space with a bright-eyed mentality; we want to help everybody in the world. At the end of the day, business for good is still business and we need to figure out ways we can bring people together on our journey.

Those two books are at the top of my list, but I also listen to podcasts. Listen to more of Impact Boom, but also [Masters of Scale] by Reid Huffman. It’s a podcast looking at scale ups and how they've progressed throughout their journey. It talks about things you should think about when you're scaling or building an enterprise, so that's a podcast I love.