JOBLESS UNDER 25s WOULD FILL THE O2 ARENA FIVE TIMES OVER
There are now 1.2 million unemployed 16 to 24-year-olds living in the UK, according to new figures published this morning by the Office of National Statistics. It is now at a 15-year high and is double the rate for the rest of the population. The number of unemployed 18 to 24-year-olds – which includes graduates – rose by 55,000 in the last three months, to reach 799,000.
Graduate Fog has just sent out this comment to journalists at the UK’s main newspapers, on behalf of this website’s founder, Tanya de Grunwald:
“Today’s figures confirm that youth unemployment is no longer just a problem – it is now a full-blown crisis. A million jobless under-25s would fill the 02 Arena five times over. That’s a lot of crushed hope.
“The government must do more – and they must do it fast. In the last six months, 48 people have found my website by Googling ‘graduate suicide’. If that doesn’t send a shiver down David Cameron’s spine, I don’t know what will.
“Employers know they hold all the cards so they are becoming ever more demanding of applicants. Young people without degrees are told they need expensive qualifications before they’ll be considered for paid jobs. Those with degrees are told they’ll need to do months of unpaid internships first. For young people, it feels like the goal posts keep moving further away.
“The government must do more to encourage businesses to invest in their young staff – and clamp down on the thousands of employer running illegal unpaid internships, where young people are effectively doing a full-time job for no pay. Employers often complain that young people aren’t ‘work ready’ – but they should remember that a little bit of training goes a long way if they choose the right candidate. Young people might not know it all on Day One, but they are packed with potential. If employers take the trouble to unlock that potential they have a huge amount to gain.”
*Did we get it right?
Is there anything you’d like to add, that we didn’t include in this press statement? Were we too tough on employers – or not tough enough? What is your reaction to the news that there are now 1.2 million young people unemployed in this country?
“but they should remember that a little bit of training goes a long way if they choose the right candidate.”
You got it wrong, in a market where supply outstrips demand there is no need to train candidates. If they choose the right candidate then they don’t need any training at all…they are out there and some already have the skills. Besides isn’t that what uni teaches you or are they too academically focussed?
Sadly, if the only parties who contribute to training are the Government and Students, with Students now expected to take out Student Loans for a 3/4 year degree and ending up with Student Debt approaching £50-£60K, and if employers don’t even offer placement let alone sponsorship, then frankly employers have no credible comment to issue about either Education, Government or Graduates.
They simply have to accept what the system delivers. Full Stop.
Of course, if employers wish to be part of the solution where training is concerned, rather than do nothing and remain part of the problem, then they have to become Stakeholders. If they don’t, then it is down to the Government to promote employer involvement, and if no training commitment is evidenced, sting each employer for a Training Levy (say) £50K per annum for each company per 50 employees.
The government has forgotten about graduates.
When the Future Jobs Fund closed, the Minister for Employment emphasised the importance of Apprenticeships in tackling youth unemployment. But Apprenticeships are not creating jobs for young people – they’re being used by employers to train existing staff – and they’re not relevant for graduates.
The Government’s graduate internship site – Graduate Talent Pool – is unregulated and advertises many unpaid internships. Graduate Fog has revealed that unpaid interns are being used by Ministers. Rather than helping young graduates the Government is supporting the exploitation of their unpaid labour.
I’ve written more about this and why graduate unemployment makes us all worse off on the Gradcore website http://bit.ly/rMd1nA
I describe being unemployed long term as feeling permanently unworthy and under constant strain. I was always coming down with freak illnesses. I was left on the scrap heap for about a year and no one would give me a job (that paid)despite my desire to work and make my mark. I could get a job anytime if I decided to work for nothing. However after the nth placement I just felt embittered and used – it wasn’t a question of experience anymore.
So now I’m ‘self employed’ that means I get work here and there and can just about pay my rent. I’m obviously not in the unemployment statistics, even though I am very much under-employed and work is irregular and unreliable. I have countless other unemployed friends, most of whom have given up looking. I agree with them – looking for work is generally a pointless exercise. I had to make my own job because I couldn’t get one. I sympathise with them deeply but I don’t know what the solution is.
The legacy of my long term stint of unemployment is that the Conservatives actually make me feel physically sick. They did nothing to help me or my unemployed friends. Except make us feel like being unemployed is our own fault.
Unemployment really does scar. While I might not like Labour either, at least the Future Jobs Fund offered a lifeline to unemployed grads
When did university ever teach people workplace skills? You learn workplace skills at work. From the way employers talk you’d think that everyone over 40 was born work ready and with workplace skills. Its as though training recent graduates is a new phenomenon that’s only appeared in the last 10 years.
I think employers have unrealistic expectations and a really bad attitude to young people.
No worker new to any job, having come from Uni or not, is ever going to be 100% fully trained and ready to work.
It is not a matter of “choosing the right candidate”, because nobody is perfect and in any job, training is inevitably going to be needed. Even in the lowest “skilled” jobs, procedures have to be learnt which have nothing to do with the university experience.
Just spent the last 3 weeks interviewing for a position, including an on the job experience day I had to drive 100 miles for, where the recruiter insisted attitude and ethos were important and I could be trained, only to be rejected at the last 3 with the reasoning they had no doubt I could do it, but the other 2 ‘just had that little more experience’ Arghhh!!
Hi– long time no see; I know it’s been a long time since I’ve posted.
But I recently stumbled on a website that really caught my eye– The Politics of Well-Being, and I submitted to Tanya an over-long and mistake-riddled email about what I discovered in that blog: namely that the UK has embraced the Emotional Intelligence movement, pioneered by Daniel Goleman and his best-selling book, much harder than I evern imagined the US had. Much to my dismay.
I read in this blog much about social-emotional learning in schools, the drive to measure well-being, happiness, etc. (qualities that really shouldn’t be measured, for reasons I outlined mostly in the email). Above all, the near-universal, non-critical acceptance in UK society of these ideas, with no regard for side effects or consequences. (e.g., Tony Blair, Newt Gingrich and others with very high levels of subjective well-being, who therefore have zero inclination to examine the very real emotional abuse they can cause others.)
It all gave me the same familiar, sickly feeling I had when I first read Goleman’s book back in the 90’s– mainly, that I was not optimistic that people would use these new learnings about emotions and neuroscience in good ways, but rather to more sophisticatedly manipulate and abuse others.
Sure enough, I feel like I’ve been proven right in many ways. The increased prevalence of what I call “emotional abuse with a smiley-face”; employers’ easy, almost automatic, resort to buzzwords such as “work-ready” that more likely convey a sort of emotional, subjective readiness than anything cognitive. Because apparently non-cognitive factors outweigh cognitive ones for career success. That may be true, but this is definitely true: it gives a convenient reason for an employer to disregard the education you worked so hard for.
Emotional Intelligence was intended to make us nicer to each other– but I fear on both sides of the pond, it’s actually made us meaner. A special kind of mean, with a smiley face and a song in our heart, where we may have caused others great harm but nonetheless feel great about ourselves.
I feel for you. We Americans are starting to wake up from our long love affair with Goleman. Your educational and political leaders, and very likely employers, are still hopelessly besotted from the looks of things.