Gen Z isn’t ‘work-ready’ – why a million young brits are unemployed
According to the UK Office for National Statistics, nearly one million British young people aged 16 to 24 were not in education, employment or training by the end of 2025.
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Young people are struggling to get their first job, and this may be because they are not ready to enter the workforce after missing out on critical social development during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Generation Z unemployment is on the rise as nearly a million British young people aged 16 to 24 will become NEET (not in education, employment or training) between July and September 2025, according to the UK Office for National Statistics.
Described as a crisis, the government launched an independent review into NEETs in December, led by former Labor Health Minister Alan Milburn.
Worryingly, the ONS report found that almost 600,000 of unemployed young people were not actively looking for work.
Young people face a variety of challenges in the job market, from AI eliminating entry-level positions to increasing job competition. More than 1.2 million applications According to the UK Student Employers Institute, only 17,000 graduate positions were applied for in the UK last year.
Meanwhile count job opportunities decreased ONS reached 729,000 in the September-November period, up nearly 10% from a year ago. Between August and October there were 2.5 unemployed people per vacancy; This figure was 1.8 the previous year.
It’s not just about economic conditions when employers and experts say that Generation Z is not sufficiently prepared to enter the workforce.
Milburn said In a recent interview with The Times Employers find that young people are “not ready to work” when they take on full-time jobs after school. “Young people don’t necessarily have to have work experience, and what they learn at school doesn’t necessarily have to be applicable to the world of work.”
Generation Lockout
UK-based charity Shaw Trust helps people find work and is working to end the NEET crisis. In an interview with CNBC Make It, Chief Impact Officer Julie Leonard talked about how virtual learning and being at home during the 2020 quarantine created a socialization gap, especially among Generation Z, ages 20 to 24.
“There are a lot of young people who have missed out on years of face-to-face education, work experience, job readiness, soft skills, and now find themselves as adults in a very difficult job market and also in a hiring environment that has completely changed over the years,” Leonard said.
Soft skills like learning to lead a team, collaborate, follow instructions are “crucial for job readiness,” and Gen Z is “missing out.”
He added that many young people are not forced to step outside their comfort zone at home, such as talking to strangers or arriving at school or work on time.
Deputy Milburn said young people could not be blamed for not being ready for work and said opportunities for young people were in “sharp decline”.
“There has been a long-term decline in the rate of 16- and 17-year-olds taking up Saturday jobs,” Milburn said in a comment quoted by The Times. “Previous generations, including mine, grew up in a place where most of us had that type of job or did paperwork or something. Not only did it provide young people with the opportunity to earn money, but it also allowed young people to learn what it meant to be in a workplace.
Leonard says part-time jobs like babysitting, gardening or doing paperwork are “critical” for getting teens used to the discipline of working. “We’ve lost that kind of stepping stone approach that is so critical,” he said.
In fact, employers at Big Four firms such as KPMG and PWC found that the youngest employees hired lacked basic business etiquette skills such as communication and collaboration.
PWC started bidding endurance training It planned to strengthen its new graduate staff in 2025 and attributed the lack of “human skills” to the pandemic. KPMG starts bidding in 2023 soft skill sessions For junior hires, including teamwork and how to give presentations.
Ask for a job in person
Instead of sitting behind a screen and sending out endless resumes that will eventually be rejected by AI, Leonard suggests going back to old-school tactics to secure jobs.
Indeed, now that job hunting has become primarily digital, many young people are sending resumes written by artificial intelligence. “It’s become so impersonal that they send emails and often get no response, which is extremely frustrating,” Leonard said.
Go to your local store and ask for work, says Julie Leonard, chief impact officer at Shaw Trust.
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“What you actually do is put together a resume, go down the high street, find someone who walks with you and gives you that flexibility and confidence and goes and says, ‘I want a job.’ He said this was an exercise Shaw Trust counselors often carried out with young people.
The type of stores where this tactic can be most successful are local mom-and-pop businesses, bars, cafes, or other small and medium-sized businesses.
“You walk in there with your CV, you talk to a manager, you start opening doors. That’s what we do. It’s about holding hands, building resilience, building the confidence to go out. It’s not sitting behind a laptop and just sending out a CV,” Leonard added.
