Moda Living has marked International Women's Day 2024 with a new mentoring programme designed to educate and inspire young talent around career opportunities in the built environment sector, that will give opportunities to more than 50 students from disadvantaged backgrounds in the next five years.

Working with Pathways to Property, Moda will welcome female identifying mentees from a range of backgrounds and aged 17-18 to the programme. Moda will work with partners including investor Harrison Street and contractor John Sisk & Son to offer insight into roles spanning a wide range of the built environment sector. Students taking part in the programme will also be offered at least two full days of shadowing their mentor in person, to give them hands on experience of working in the sector and of being in a professional environment.

The programme will support the students in development of professional skills such as CV writing, leadership, communication and more, as well as give them hands on experience in the rental living and investment sectors to build a picture of what sort of career the built environment could hold for them.


As the scheme progresses Moda will continue to open the mentoring scheme up to students from an increasingly wide range of backgrounds and communities. The first intake of 10 mentees has already been confirmed, with mentoring sessions on track to begin in the coming weeks.

The mentoring scheme will form a key strand of the Moda Training Academy, Moda’s bespoke inhouse training programme for new and existing team members. Launched in 2023, the Academy inspires new talent and upskills existing team members as part of Moda's commitment to evolving and supporting its people across the UK.

Moda marked the launch of the new mentoring scheme with a new video, ‘We Made it Possible’, featuring women in different roles and career stages from both businesses sharing insights and stories from their careers. The video highlights the importance of the work that the women do individually and as part of their wider teams, which all come together on a final scale to produce outstanding living products across the UK.

Tarry Depledge, ESG Manager at Moda Living, said: "At Moda our team is 40% female and growing, and it is essential to us to build on and maintain that balance for the business to be the best it can be. This International Women’s Day we are so proud to be launching a mentoring programme to help more young women prepare for the professional world and give them a taste of the many fantastic career paths that are on offer to them in the built environment, and to share our new video showcasing just a few of the amazing women working across our delivery pipeline.

"This is just one puzzle piece in our mission to evolve the diversity of the sector. It is crucial to open the industry up to people of all ages, backgrounds and communities, so it is paramount that we work as individual businesses and as an industry to keep creating new opportunities for individuals which will in turn greatly benefit everyone in the long term."