On the evening of the Black Tech Achievement Awards 2026, sponsored by Virgin Media O2, Apprentis founder Iyioluwa Adesan was named Diversity Champion 2026. It is a recognition that carries weight not just as an individual honour, but as a signal about what becomes possible when someone refuses to accept that a broken system is a permanent one.

The Journey That Built the Mission

Iyioluwa did not arrive at this work from a position of privilege or ease. The barriers were real and the path was not straightforward. Academic setbacks, low UCAS points, financial pressure, and the persistent experience of navigating systems that were not designed with people like them in mind were not abstract challenges. They were daily realities.

What those experiences produced, however, was clarity. A clear-eyed understanding of exactly where systems fail young people, and why. Not through research alone, but through lived experience of being inside a pipeline that was meant to carry you forward and quietly did not.

Iyioluwa began their professional career as a Degree Apprentice in Digital and Technology Solutions at NatWest, progressing into a Digital Journey Manager role. That experience sharpened a particular way of thinking, not just about technology, but about how systems either enable progression or filter people out without ever announcing that they are doing so.

The decision to leave a stable, established role to build something from scratch was not impulsive. It was the result of seeing the same gap repeatedly at scale. Opportunity was no longer the primary problem. Readiness was. And nobody was building the infrastructure to close it.

The System Behind the Award

Apprentis was not built as a content platform or an information service. It was built as infrastructure, a structured system designed to address the precise points at which young people typically stall, disengage, or leave the apprenticeship pipeline entirely.

The framework that emerged from this thinking has six stages: Start, Find, Apply, Learn, Connect, and Succeed. Each stage mirrors how successful apprentices actually progress. Each one is a targeted intervention at a specific point of friction.

This distinction matters. Many existing resources tell young people what apprenticeships are. Apprentis was built to prepare them to compete for the ones that match their ambitions, and to sustain their progress once they secure them.

The framework was tested in schools. It was tested in colleges. And in November 2025, it was deployed in its most demanding environment yet, across all 23 stops of London's Elizabeth Line, engaging with the general public without any pre-selected audience or controlled conditions. The objective was simple: to find out whether the system could hold outside a classroom. It did.

The Apprentis Impact Report 2025 documents the outcomes of the first full year of building and running this system. The numbers tell a clear story. Over 10,000 young people were reached. More than 3,000 received direct, structured support. From that group, over 300 secured confirmed apprenticeship placements, approximately one in ten of everyone directly supported walking away with a named offer.

Of those placements, 79 per cent were degree apprenticeships, among the most competitive routes available to young people in the UK. The 92 employers represented across 10 sectors included Goldman Sachs, Rolls-Royce, Amazon, Airbus, and Deloitte.

Eighty-five per cent of Apprentis users came from ethnic minority communities.

Every one of these outcomes was achieved with zero public funding, no blueprint to follow, and no existing model to replicate. Just a clear understanding of what was broken, and the discipline to build what was missing.

What This Award Means for the Black Tech Community

Recognition like the BTA Awards is not simply about the individual who receives it. It carries meaning for an entire community.

For Black professionals in technology, visibility at this level matters because it shifts the picture of who belongs in these spaces and who is capable of leading within them. Awards, convenings, and platforms that celebrate Black excellence in tech are not ceremonial. They are informational. They tell the next generation of founders, engineers, builders, and leaders what is possible and that the path exists.

Iyioluwa's story in particular carries a specific kind of power for that community. This is not a story about a smooth ascent through systems that worked perfectly. It is a story about someone who encountered the same barriers that hold countless young Black people back, understood those barriers from the inside, and turned that understanding into a system designed to dismantle them.

The Diversity Champion award, in that context, is a recognition that the work of building more inclusive and effective pathways is not peripheral to the technology sector. It is central to it. And it is work being done, visibly and measurably, by people who carry lived experience of what exclusion actually looks like.

Representation without impact is performance. What makes this moment different is that the recognition is grounded in outcomes: real young people, real placements, real employers, real change.

The Responsibility That Follows

Iyioluwa has been clear about what this award represents. It is not a destination. It is a point of accountability.

The work continues. The AI Intake Agent, launched to provide personalised guidance at scale through the Apprentis platform, is being refined and expanded. The system is being adapted for new contexts as Apprentis moves toward scaling into Africa and the United States, carrying the same principles of structured readiness into regions where the gap between access and outcome is equally, if not more, acute.

The Diversity Champion award matters because it validates the core belief behind everything Apprentis has built: that when you stop treating readiness as a personal quality that some young people have and others do not, and start treating it as the product of systems that either develop it or fail to, outcomes change. Measurably. Reliably. At scale.

This award belongs to Iyioluwa. It also belongs to every student who took a chance on the Apprentis framework, every school and employer who trusted the vision, and every young person who is still working their way through a system that was not built for them but will not stop them.

The work does not pause for awards. But moments like this remind us why it matters, and who it is for.