Youth unemployment groups have warned that young people are facing complicated challenges when entering the workforce, with youth unemployment in London the highest in the UK, data shows.
The King’s Trust is a unemployment charity set up in 1976 by King Charles III, it aims to help young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to gain employment, warns that young people are anxious about the current economic climate.
Newly released data released from the ONS shows how unemployment in London is the largest in the UK, reaching 7.2%, with youth unemployment at 17.7%.
Sharon Gyimah, The King’s Trust head of delivery, said: “There is a lot of different factors that’s driving unemployment in London is what we’re hearing from young people.
“We have young people who went to university and can’t find work as well as people without many qualifications that also can’t find work – a lot of the work we do is building confidence in young people on how to best navigate the job market.”
The King’s Trust said the factors that are making it harder for young people to confidently enter the labour force is how competitive the market is and the future role of AI in their job security.
The Trust said 60% of young people who they surveyed are worried about AI and 51% say how they feel unprepared for how competitive the London job market is.
Gyimah said: “This is part of the reason why employers do value experience and that does give you that edge over other candidates.
“Thats why from our side we try and advocate for these young people because, yes obviously having these experiences is useful and helpful but its not necessarily a measure of ones potential.
“The way we work with employers is to help them understand the value that young people can bring, that’s we work with training and mentoring for young people to better equip them to demonstrate to employers what they can bring without necessarily having that experience.”
‘These trends are underpinned by a range of complicated factors’
Impetus, a non-profit organisation that aims to help young from disadvantaged backgrounds gain employment, education or training also discussed how these unemployment figures are shrouded in more complicated factors.
Ayesha Baloch, Impetus youth employment policy lead, said: “The main first thing I would say is these trends are underpinned by a range of complicated factors, so its really difficult for us to particularly, looking at quarterly changes, to say without a shadow of a doubt that this is the way it is heading.
“Labour Force Survey have had a lot of issues in terms of quality assurance over the past couple of years.”
Impetus conducted its own research called the Youth Jobs Gap and found young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, eligible for free school meals, are twice as likely to Not be in Education, Employment or Training (NEET) than people from more advantaged backgrounds.
Baloch said: “So what you usually see in the labour market, with young people in particular, is this concept of last in, first out.
“Which means any kind of general changes that we see in the labour market are going to affect young people first, and within that group, its going to be young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.”
Impetus suggests that its about helping young people from disadvantaged backgrounds at an early age to achieve higher qualifications in order for them to not be in employment, education or training.
Impetus said based off their research young people are 80% more likely to be NEET if they don’t achieve a pass qualification in at least five GCSE subjects, and people on free school meals are 66% more likely to be NEET.
Baloch said: “When it comes to what we would want to see, I think, for us, we would like to say it starts all the way back at school.
“Supporting particularly those young people facing these extreme barriers, supporting them to get English and Maths GCSE’s in particular.
“The other thing I would say is that those young people who are facing the kind of worst combination of disadvantage and qualifications need to be supplemented by additional support.”
Impetus also looked into the different ethnic disparities and their NEET likelihood to better understand young peoples specific issues in finding employment.
Baloch said: “Our data found that when looking the ethnic backgrounds, you have no idea what’s going on underneath them and the differences within these categories are really big.
“So when you look Black African and Black Caribbean there is big differences in NEET likelihood, same thing in the white community with Roma and Irish White Traveller compared to White British and White Other.”
Data shows the White Irish Traveller and White Roma communities have the highest likelihood of being NEET, at 210% and 155% respectively, with Indian communities least likely to be NEET at -32%.
Baloch said: “The point of all this data is that its really hard, even when you’re just looking at London, to point to the unemployment figures and say one thing is happening.
“It is a lot of different things that are separate to different local authorities so the issues of youth unemployment is multi-faceted.”
‘Young people want to stay in London’
The King’s Trust say while young people do experience issues in training accessibility and increased competition, the majority of their young people do wish to stay in London for employment opportunities.
The Trust said through its initiatives and training it has helped generate £555million of social value to the UK economy over the past 10 years.
Gyimah said: “Despite the rising youth unemployment in London I just want young people to understand that they’re not alone and there is a lot of support and training for young people to gain employment.”
Impetus, similarly, has initiatives in place to support young people to get into employment, with the organisation having relationships with Generation UK and SPEAR that aim to give young people technical skill bootcamps and coaching.
Impetus said young people who completed the course with SPEAR were 25% more likely to be in employment and young people who completed the courses with Generation UK had a 71% employment rate after a year.
Bolach said: “We would say that we need to reframe the problem from there’s too many people in the job market and instead we need to understand the peoples individual problems.
“And after better understanding this, we get to a place where the interventions exist to support these young people into employment, education or training, and these interventions are more targeted, and specific.”
Featured image credit: The King’s Trust
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