1 million young people in the UK are not in work, education, or training. That is the headline figure from the Skills England report a few weeks ago, and it is the one getting all the airtime.
But there is another number buried in the data that I have not been able to stop thinking about.
84% of those young people want to work.
This really goes against the narrative of Gen Z being work-shy and lazy. I also remember when millennials were the precious little work-shy snowflakes, so perhaps we should be cautious about generational narratives in general.
There is a clear gap - between wanting to work and actually working - being created by something else. And I do not think we are being honest enough about what that something else is.
The Floor Is Falling
Entry-level job adverts are down 25%. Companies with high AI exposure are cutting junior roles faster than others. The jobs that used to be the way in - the ones where you learned on the job, made mistakes on small things, and built up a track record - are disappearing faster than we have a plan to replace them.
And the institutions designed to catch people are not designed for this moment. Education optimises for grades. Colleges optimise for qualifications. Welfare systems manage income, not employability. Mental health support sits in its own silo, focusing on in-the-moment treatment, not pathways. Everyone is hitting their own metric. Nobody is responsible for the outcome that actually matters: a young person who can demonstrate they are capable of something, to someone who needs it done.
What I Actually Look For When I Hire
Honestly, when I hire into junior roles, I could not care less about a degree. Having a part-time job is actually a much better metric - but even those are disappearing.
Uni, grades - none of it shows me what someone can actually do.
The solution is not another catalogue of courses. It is not a leaderboard of AI usage. It is building ways for people to show what they can do - and having those demonstrations mean something to the people doing the hiring.
The Part I Find Hard To Say
I run a small business. We brought our intern from last year back rather than take a funded place for a new one. I know exactly why we made that choice - hiring someone into their first job carries real risk when you are small, and we were not sure a summer with a lot going on was the right time for a new intern.
I think this is more common than people admit, and pretending otherwise does not help anyone. And this is where I see a real gap for government or universities to intervene. The current university internship schemes cover part of the National Living Wage - but we pay above that, there are costs to hiring anyone beyond salary, and none of it covers the time it takes to actually manage someone well. The incentive structure is not quite right for small businesses who want to do the right thing but cannot absorb the full cost of doing it.
What Needs To Change
The Skills England report names the right problems. Skills shortages, declining employer investment in training, AI reshaping every sector, young people struggling to demonstrate employability, a fragmented and inconsistent system. These are real.
What is missing is who gets to be in the room when we design the response.
When I talk to our Gen Z intern about navigating this job market, I genuinely do not know what to tell them. The routes I took do not exist in the same form. The entry points I used have narrowed or closed. I can see the problem clearly. I am much less clear on the answer.
The people actually living this - young people who want to work and cannot find the way in, the youth workers and career advisers and college tutors working with them every day - need to be part of building the bridge, not just the subject of the policy documents about it.
Because the bridge we need is not more content. It is a way of demonstrating capability that employers can trust, and a genuine on-ramp for people who have never had the chance to prove what they can do.
We know how to build evidence of capability. We do it every day for regulated industries.
The question is whether we are able to point that at the people who need it most.
We Are Actively Exploring This
We are looking at grants and partnerships to take what we have built into early careers - and we would genuinely love to talk to anyone working on this problem. Youth organisations, universities, employers, policymakers. If you are in this space and want to compare notes, get in touch.