So today it has emerged that the National Careers Council believe that young people are lacking the understanding of the jobs market, and that face-to-face information is needed as part of an upgrade in careers advice, so today I wanted to talk about careers.
As we have seen over the past few years, particularly since the recession started, youth unemployment has been on the rise. It has been reported that there are currently over 1 million young people who come under the acronym ‘NEET’, which stands for Not in Education, Employment, or Training. This is all coming at a time when businesses are claiming that they have difficulty recruiting suitably qualified staff. If I’m honest, this quite frankly gets me angry. If businesses are struggling to get suitably qualified staff, how about take on one of the 1 million NEETs and train them, particularly if you are earning multi millions a year like the supermarkets do? If you are earning all that money, training shouldn’t be an issue for you. So instead of moaning about the lack of qualified staff you’ve got, get your managers out of the office and doing something useful and get some of these youngsters into work. This would provide a lot more skills for the youngsters, but it will also give potential to have an employee in the long term, which in this day and age is pretty hard to come by.
It seems today that we are not of the era where young people get into work. I’m a living example of this. I went to a high attaining Grammar School, got a very strong education, and am working towards a degree. But low and behold, none of these companies would even give me a summer job just to give me something to do while I finished university for the year. Last year, I applied for a job in the local country park over the summer, which was a job working with children. 8 people were interviewed for 2 positions. 2 of the interviewees were trainee teachers, myself and 1 other. Common sense would be to take the two of us as we have the experience, but nope, neither one of us got a position. This brings me on nicely to my next point. Companies don’t always employ the best staff because they won’t give them the opportunities.
My final point is all about confidence. More and more companies are looking for 1 key word: experience. This is immediately knocking out all the young people because they will not have experience. How does that make a young person looking for work feel? Well unsurprisingly, they would have no confidence in themselves, and thus would give up applying for work. Even apprenticeships these days seem impossible to come by, and that has been a government drive for a while now.
I agree with the report when they suggest that more needs to be done with young people with respect to careers, but for me this is all about the businesses. Instead of completing isolating these 1 million NEETs, get them in to work with you. Sure it’ll cost money to train them in the short term, but in the long term you’ve got someone who works for you on a lower wage than someone with experience will command, on a potential longer term basis, which surely has to be a good thing right?
Comment your thoughts 🙂
Mr Melaney 