Youth Employment
Our Commissioners are passionate about creating and encouraging more career opportunities for young people.
One in every five young people in the UK are not in education, employment or training. By 2022 this will have cost the economy nearly £28 billion in social security payments and lost productivity.
On top of this are vast human and social costs: youth employment puts people at increased risk of mental health problems and lower lifetime earnings, as well as exacerbating social inequality and unrest.
Our publications, fuelled by the latest UKCES research, explain the difficulties young people face in today’s labour market. We urge employers to commit to a Youth Policy, to offer more opportunities for our young people to get in and move up in the workplace.
The youth employment challenge , published in Summer 2012, sets out how the structure of the labour market and employer recruitment practices are making it increasingly difficult for young people to get into work. It highlights the importance of employer practice in tackling this challenge, and calls for all employers to adopt a ‘Youth policy’ which could include opening up recruitment practices, offering work experience or taking on an apprentice.
Our follow up report Scaling the youth employment challenge, published in Spring 2013, examines the extent to which employers do engage in work experience and apprenticeship programs, and the reasons why many more employers are still holding back. In the panel on the right, you can watch our Chairman Sir Charlie Mayfield talk about the key findings in the report.
Our goal at UKCES is to double youth engagement among UK employers. We want to see half of all employers offering work experience, up from the current one in four. We want a third of employers to offer apprenticeships, up from the current 15 per cent. There are many excellent examples of businesses stepping up to help young people into work, but there is scope to do much more. By moving towards greater and more ambitious employer ownership we could achieve a great deal.
This work on youth employment builds on our earlier report ‘The Youth Inquiry‘. In 2011 we were charged by Commissioners and key sponsors to investigate the kind of activities, including improved education and employer engagement that most effectively supports young people into the labour market.
