Building a future talent pipeline: Adobe’s Discover Tech Story

By Rachel Morar

Technology

•

4 min read

Company Adobe

Industry Technology

Employees

With an established intern programme feeding into a thriving graduate scheme, almost every Adobe UK graduate begins their career as an intern or university placement student. Adobe were keen to build on this by engaging younger students.

They wanted to reach a broader, more diverse pool of future talent, raise the Adobe brand profile with a new audience and build the team’s experience of managing junior hires. Doing this would also support a longer-term ambition of creating an apprenticeship scheme.

However, engagement with school and college students was limited to occasional ad hoc work experience. “We do very small pockets of work experience,” explained Rebecca Clarke, Head of Talent, EMEA. “We typically see employees who bring in their family relation or customer contact, and they’ll spend a week with us, but it’s done on a case-by-case basis.” And, although these work experience placements were successful and appreciated by the students who took part, Rebecca and Cal Lopes, Talent Partner, wanted to create a more formal process to reach more students, including those from more diverse backgrounds.

An easier way to engage with young people

Adobe had explored building an in-house school programme from scratch but was challenged by the lack of an existing schools network and the internal resources to build and run it.

Discover Tech arrived at the perfect point in time, as Rebecca explained, “It was almost fortuitous that this all came together; Discover Tech gave us a low-risk way to start building a name with an audience we hadn’t engaged before.”

“It was almost fortuitous that this all came together; Discover Tech gave us a low-risk way to start building a name with an audience we hadn’t engaged before.”

With clear goals for early talent engagement, the practical case for Discover Tech was just as compelling. In addition to an absent schools network, Adobe’s team lacked the safeguarding expertise and logistics to engage with the students safely and effectively – all things that Connectr has in place, allowing Adobe to plug into a ready-made model.

Importantly, the programme brought scale that Adobe couldn’t have achieved alone. By partnering with big names in tech such as Cisco, Accenture and IBM, Adobe was able to host 25 students in the pilot and 33 in the second round, while getting in front of hundreds of young people.

The full programme reached more than 664 students in 2026 and is targeted to reach 1,200 in 2027. Rebecca says:

‍“We could never achieve that if we were doing something ourselves in-house,”

Discover Tech in action

Discover Tech is a two-day event. On the first day, students met with a diverse range of tech employers and listened to an expert panel that included a representative from Adobe. The second day was more immersive, with smaller groups of students hosted by employers, including Adobe, providing an in-depth understanding of what it’s like to work for a tech company.

Icebreaker with Rochelle Gray, Early Careers Talent Partner

Adobe’s students began their second day with icebreaker games before touring its impressive new London basement studio, which they absolutely loved, as Cal explains:

‍“The moment they walked in, you could see their faces light up as they looked around, saying, ‘Wow, what is this?’ That kind of reaction told us everything – we knew they were excited to be there and that they were going to enjoy their day.”

Early Careers panel discussion hosted by Cal Lopes, Corporate Functions

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The students then listened to a panel of current interns and graduates, several of whom shared their own routes into tech. This included one intern, who shared his already-squiggly career path: having failed a medical degree, taking a gap year to reassess, and pivoting into psychology before happily landing at Adobe. As Rebecca pointed out:

‍“At a stage in their lives where academic success can feel like the most important thing, messages like this from young people of a similar age are really important.”

The volunteers also felt the benefits of being involved in Discover Tech. Another intern who’d been too shy to raise his hand in meetings when he first joined, sat on the panel as a comfortable, practised speaker. “You would not think he ever struggled with talking in front of people,” Cal says. Similarly, a group of girls who arrived nervous about the closing challenge went on to win it, splitting roles and backing each other up under pressure despite not knowing each other.

Adobe volunteers delivering student feedback

What’s next for Adobe and Discover Tech?

Discover Tech has been a successful first step for Adobe in working with school-age students, and they are positive about the opportunity to partner with other tech businesses to raise awareness of the varied career opportunities within the industry. Keen to continue to maximise the benefits, Adobe has already signed up for year two of Discover Tech.