Tauranga’s young people may want to come home after university. But wanting to return is only part of the equation. If the internships, graduate roles and first real career opportunities are somewhere else, that may be where their lives begin too.

At 21, Ruby is seven weeks away from finishing university and thinking carefully about what comes next. But none of this was particularly mapped out. At school, university was not even her immediate plan.

Ruby had imagined heading overseas with Camp America and putting university off for a while. It was only around September or October in her final year, close to application cut-off dates, that she decided she probably should go. The decision came late enough that she had not saved money for university, had not organised accommodation and still did not really know what she wanted to study.

What she did know was that she liked people. At Tauranga Girls’ College she had studied physical education, psychology and business subjects, and she could see herself doing something involving communication and understanding people. She applied to universities in Canterbury and Wellington and eventually headed south to the University of Canterbury to study communications and marketing, with some psychology alongside it.

Half a semester into communications, she realised it was not quite what she expected. The course felt less focused on people-centred communications than she had imagined, so she changed direction, moving into marketing and management. It was an early lesson in something that would become a theme in Ruby’s story: sometimes the next step only becomes clear once you start moving.

Halfway through her second year, she began applying for internships. Lots of them.

“I think I applied for probably twenty plus,” she says.

They were spread across New Zealand, with a few in Australia, and some had very little connection to what she was studying. Competition was fierce and Ruby’s approach was simple: apply widely and see what opened up. One of those applications was to project management consultancy RCP. Project management had never been part of her plan. In fact, before RCP invited her to interview, she knew very little about what the company did.

When the email arrived, Ruby began researching RCP, its work and the development happening around Tauranga. A few weeks later, she had landed the internship. RCP is a Kiwi-owned project consultancy working nationally across advisory, project management and contract administration. The business runs a summer internship programme across its offices each year, attracting a large number of applications.

For Josh Harris, Associate | Tauranga Manager at RCP, Ruby made the final shortlist of five candidates interviewed for the Tauranga opportunity. Josh remembers her standing out for the clarity and confidence she brought to the interview.

The internship brought Ruby home, and perhaps more importantly, it introduced her to a career she had never known she wanted. Ruby spent the internship learning from the inside rather than from a lecture theatre. She travelled to Rotorua two to three days a week to work on a particular project, attended stakeholder and project meetings, learnt about procurement and client relationships, worked with requests for information and contract instructions, and prepared progress payment schedules. At university, she had completed one paper that touched briefly on project management. At RCP, she began to understand what the job actually involved, and her biggest lesson was not technical.

“Communication is ninety per cent of the job,” she says.

She saw how several people could leave the same meeting having interpreted the conversation differently, and how important it was to clarify expectations, ask questions and make sure everyone understood what happened next. She also learnt something about herself.

“How capable I was with something new,” she says. “It was an eye opener, and it made me think, what else could I be chucked into and thrive well in?”

That confidence did not come from being kept on the sidelines. Ruby was given work that mattered. She remembers the first time she prepared a progress payment schedule and how daunting it felt knowing it would eventually need senior sign-off before going to the client. She worried about getting things wrong, asked questions constantly and went back to her mentors, Senior Project Manager, Mike Bricknell and Josh Harris whenever she was unsure. They gave her their time, taught her and trusted her with more.

“It felt like more than just an internship for me,” she says. “I felt like I was valued, I was important and capable.”

The value went both ways. Josh says Ruby brought a different energy into a Tauranga team made up largely of people further into their careers. For RCP, that is part of the value of bringing younger people into the business. They arrive with different experiences, questions and perspectives, while gaining exposure to people who have already spent years working in the industry. By the end of the internship, Ruby did not want to go back to university.

“I felt like I was meant to be there forever.”

That says something important about the potential of work experience when it is done well. An internship can add a line to a CV, but it can also reveal an industry a young person did not know existed, connect study with real life, put an experienced mentor alongside someone at exactly the point they need one, and show a young person there may be a place for them in the town they grew up in.

For Ruby, that place became Tauranga. She wants to return to the project management industry after graduating and would ideally begin as an assistant project manager, supporting senior project managers and working with the people and stakeholder relationships she discovered she enjoyed so much. Longer term, she can imagine herself becoming a senior project manager, perhaps moving further into leadership one day.

It is quite a shift for someone who, only a few years ago, was not sure whether she would go to university at all. But Ruby’s story also exposes a more difficult question for Tauranga: what would have happened if RCP had not offered that internship? The answer is surprisingly straightforward. Ruby would have gone somewhere else.

“I was gonna go wherever I was offered something,” she says. She expected that opportunity would probably be in Auckland or Christchurch. Her preference for Tauranga mattered, but the availability of the opportunity mattered more.

That is where the conversation becomes bigger than one graduate and one employer. We talk a great deal about retaining talent, attracting young people back to the region and building the workforce Tauranga will need as it grows. But young people cannot build careers on regional aspiration alone. They need an entry point.

Josh sees that challenge from the employer side too. RCP can create career opportunities, but employers are also competing with larger cities, overseas experiences and places where young people may see more happening socially, culturally and professionally. A good job may be the reason someone comes to a region, but it will not necessarily be the reason they stay. Young people are also deciding what kind of life they can build around that job: whether there are places to meet people, things happening after work, opportunities to build friendships and networks, and a sense of energy and possibility.

Josh says that was one of the things he noticed when he first came to Tauranga. Having started his career in larger UK cities, he expected Tauranga to feel more metropolitan than it did. He also sees how difficult it can be for younger people arriving without established family or social networks.

That means the responsibility for retaining young people cannot sit with employers alone. Businesses can provide meaningful work, mentoring and career progression, but the wider region also has a role to play in creating a city young people actively want to participate in. That includes an active city centre, a strong social and cultural life, places where people can connect, and a sense that there is something here for those at the beginning of their careers as well as those already established. Becoming more metropolitan is not about Tauranga trying to imitate Auckland or another large city. It is about creating enough activity, choice and connection that a young person can arrive here and see a life taking shape around them.

That matters economically as well as socially. If a graduate takes their first job elsewhere because another city offers both the career and the lifestyle they are looking for, Tauranga may not simply lose them for a year or two. They begin building professional networks, friendships, relationships and routines somewhere else, and the longer those roots grow, the harder it becomes to attract them back. RCP has seen some of that firsthand, losing talented younger staff to overseas experience and the desire to broaden their horizons. Josh says the business stays connected with them in the hope some may eventually return.

“Bringing young people straight out of university to stay in this town, it’s hard,” he says.

That makes people like Ruby particularly important. She already wanted Tauranga. What she needed was a career opportunity that allowed her to choose it. The bigger challenge for the region is making sure that, once young people have that opportunity, Tauranga also gives them enough reasons to build a life around it. Ruby believes more local businesses need to offer internships, graduate opportunities and meaningful early career roles.

“It was just so amazing to be able to come home and do my internship and work in the place that I called home,” she says. “I know that a lot of other people my age would love to do that too, but there just aren’t the opportunities.”

What surprised her was how little she had known about what was happening here. Before the RCP opportunity, she had not understood the scale of Tauranga’s growth or the projects reshaping the city. She suspects many other young people studying outside the region are similarly unaware.

“I didn’t think there’d be any,” she says of local opportunities. “Just because of how small it is, or how unwell they’re advertised. But I also think there is a lack of them offered as well.”

That distinction matters. Tauranga may have opportunities young people do not know about, but it may also simply need more of them. University students are not necessarily waiting until graduation and then deciding where they would like to live. They are making those decisions much earlier. They are searching SEEK, Indeed, Prosple and LinkedIn, attending university career expos, asking family and friends who they know, building networks and applying across multiple cities at once. Ruby was doing exactly that.

The first employer to say yes can have an influence far beyond a summer internship, and that becomes especially clear when Ruby talks about her partner. He is also studying at Canterbury, in mechanical engineering, and ideally, they would both like to return to Tauranga. Ruby can now see a career here. He needs to find one too.

“If he can get a role or an internship, he would ideally like to come back here too,” she says. But if he cannot, the decision changes.

“I would love to live here. But I’ve been lucky. So, it might be a case of, we may have to go elsewhere to live because he can’t get a job here.”

That is not simply the potential loss of one graduate. It can become the loss of two people, the skills they develop, the careers they build and the contribution they might otherwise have made here. Ruby can already see the contradiction. There is significant growth happening across Tauranga, with more expected through the Regional Deal, yet someone studying engineering may still struggle to see a clear pathway into that future.

“There is massive growth happening already,” she says.

The question is whether young people can see themselves in it. When we ask why graduates leave Tauranga, the answer may not be that they desperately want to live somewhere else. Sometimes another city simply offers first. And once someone takes that first role elsewhere, their life begins to organise itself around it. They develop professional networks, progress to another role, they establish friendships and routines, and eventually there may be a home, children, schools and a community around them. A decision made at 21 about where to take a first job can quietly influence where someone builds the next decade of their life.

That means the question for Tauranga businesses cannot only be, “How do we attract experienced people?” It is also worth asking how many young people we could keep connected to Tauranga in the first place.

Not every business can employ a graduate every year, but perhaps more could offer an internship, a summer placement, a few weeks of meaningful work experience or a project a student could own with the guidance of an experienced staff member. Sometimes the opportunity can be as simple as a chance to sit in the room, listen, ask questions and learn from someone who is prepared to make time for them. Josh acknowledges that investment is real. Interns require time, supervision and mentoring, and they are not brought into RCP as an immediate source of revenue.

But there is a business case too.

Recruiting experienced people can be expensive, particularly when the right skills are difficult to find locally. An internship gives RCP time to get to know someone, see how they work and understand whether they are a good fit for the business. And that relationship can continue long after the internship finishes. An intern may return to RCP later in their career, or, if they move elsewhere in New Zealand, be connected with another RCP office.

“You’ve got to invest in it,” Josh says.

For RCP, that investment is as much about building a future talent pipeline as filling an immediate vacancy.

RCP took on around 10 to 12 interns nationally and backed that programme with mentoring and its own online learning resources. In Tauranga, Ruby says Mike and Josh pushed her, included her and encouraged her to learn. She was also the youngest person in a small, largely male team, sometimes by five or six years. Rather than feeling diminished by that, she says working across generations helped her mature professionally and become more confident communicating with different people. At 21, in a male-dominated industry she had never considered entering, she found somewhere she felt she belonged. And RCP may have found a future employee.

That is the exchange that can sometimes be overlooked when businesses think about internships as something they provide for young people. Businesses gain something too. Young people bring different thinking, curiosity, new skills, questions established teams may no longer think to ask and, as Ruby puts it, a different kind of energy.

“Young people are so alive and creative. We can bring so much to a team.”

Tauranga is investing heavily in what its future will look like. New infrastructure matters, new civic spaces matter and economic growth matters. But a city’s future is also shaped by who gets to participate in building it. Ruby wants to be part of that future, and her partner would like to be too. There will be many others studying around New Zealand and overseas with similar connections to this region. Some will be certain about what they want to do. Many will not, and Ruby’s story suggests certainty is not what we should be waiting for. Sometimes a young person needs the opportunity to try something, discover what they are capable of and see that a career they had never considered might be waiting for them here.

Somewhere right now is another Ruby applying for dozens of internships and prepared to go wherever the opportunity takes them. They may love Tauranga, their family may be here, and they may imagine coming home one day, but love for a place does not create a career. Opportunity does.

If we want our young people to build their futures here, Tauranga businesses need to give them the chance to start them here.

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