At Barclays as co-chair of Spectrum for London & South East, Billy set up the first Trans focused apprenticeship scheme, working closely with Mermaids, a charity providing support to trans kids and their families. As well as offering opportunities to young people, the apprenticeship programme will give parents the opportunity to apply as “mature applicants” and restart their career journey, at Barclays. Billy is now helping other organisations replicate the scheme. In his immediate business area he increased diversity from 9% to 52%, and proactively ensured that all interviews have diverse candidate lists. He also appointed the first allies to the network committee, all of whom are senior leaders who have “come out for LGBT+”. Outside the workplace, Billy has been mentoring FTSE100 and S&P500 companies in setting up and running LGBT diversity networks. Additionally he has been encouraging young graduates to be “authentic”, proactively approaching, organising and delivering speeches and panel events at a number of Universities, including at Oxford University. Furthermore, he has been a very active member of OUTstanding, participating on almost all events and up-skilling sessions, and ensuring that he makes a lot of noise promoting those events and encourage others to also join.
