The decline in young people’s ‘work readiness’ is frequently cited in the debate about the NEET crisis and the wider prospects of today’s generation of young people. Alan Milburn’s interim diagnostic report emphasised that young people’s lack of work readiness should not be seen as an individual deficit but as a failure of the system to support transitions from education to work.
As the Milburn Review moves from diagnosis to solutions for a report due in the autumn, it offers a rare opportunity to establish consensus across education, employers and policymakers for the first time on what we mean by work readiness and the system changes required to support every young person to develop it.
Recent evidence, including work funded by the Nuffield Foundation, provides a deeper understanding of the components of work readiness and shows that improvement requires a more integrated response across education and employment.
Work readiness skills
Employers value skills as much as qualifications and report that young people applying for entry-level jobs often lack them.
The five-year Skills Imperative 2035 programme led by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), provides the strongest evidence to date on which skills will be most needed over the next decade as technology and other global trends transform work. According to the research, the six most essential employment skills are collaboration; communication; creative thinking; information literacy; organising, planning and prioritising; and problem solving and decision making.
Our approach to work readiness needs to start early. Longitudinal evidence demonstrates that essential employment skills emerge from the social, emotional and cognitive capabilities that children develop from early childhood. Skills and behaviours are mutually reinforcing and cumulative, so that inequalities that emerge in early childhood or primary schools can widen unless addressed early.
Children growing up in poverty are less likely to experience home environments that support learning and more likely to miss out on the opportunities within and outside of school to develop these skills. The new enrichment benchmarks, which provide a framework for activities such as sport and music, are a positive development. The participation of disadvantaged and vulnerable children will need to be actively supported by addressing barriers such as cost to ensure that enrichment activities support work readiness as well as wider personal development.
Essential employment skills need more emphasis within the curriculum. Time for teamwork, creative thinking and problem-solving is often constrained by accountability and assessment systems that prioritise examined content. Essential employment skills can be defined, measured, taught and learned, and tools already exist to support this. Countries that make the teaching of social-emotional skills explicit in the curriculum, such as Switzerland and Portugal, have higher levels of skills and lower skills inequalities.
Early exposure to work
First-hand experiences of workplaces contribute to work readiness by honing behaviours, attitudes and career plans.
Recent evidence suggests that, for lower attainers, the potential benefits of spending longer in education need to be weighed against the loss of opportunities to experience being in a workplace through work-based training or entry-level jobs. Evaluations of two policies aimed at improving education and employment outcomes – the Raising of the Participation Age and the Education Maintenance Allowance – found them to be less beneficial than expected in the long run. This was partly due to low interest in the courses chosen, higher drop-out rates, financial pressures, and deficiencies in the resourcing and data tracking needed to find and support those who had disengaged from education.
This raises a difficult question; which activities should the system incentivise, and what blend and sequence of classroom and work-based learning is most effective?
International evidence supports starting careers education early with regular exposure to employers through career talks and workplace experiences, and opportunities to develop work readiness skills and understanding of the world of work. Careers education has improved markedly over the past decade. However, given the structural constraints facing employers, more coordination, support and incentives at national and local level are needed for employers to provide sufficient experiences to all young people. This includes increasing apprenticeships, which are in high demand among young people.
Distance from work readiness
Behind the headline of 1 million NEET young people lies the high rate of economic inactivity – young people who are not looking for work – driven in part by rising rates of mental ill health and other challenges such as insecure housing or caring responsibilities.
Through our deep dive workshops with young people – part of our Grown up? Journeys to adulthood programme – we heard first-hand how far some young people feel from being able to commit to a job. It remains unclear how far improvements in essential employment skills, meaningful engagement in post-16 learning, and workplace exposure could improve mental wellbeing and lessen the impact of wider challenges on accessing work.
Skills aside, the responsibility for improving access to work should be shared by employers. The young people we spoke to described the system of finding and starting work difficult to navigate. Interactions with employers were sometimes hostile, exacerbating stress and detachment. Not receiving feedback on applications undermines motivation and improvement.
If employers viewed work readiness as a journey – one in which they can play an active role – rather than a destination that young people should reach before they apply for a job, transitions could be easier. Opportunities to gain a foothold – through apprenticeships, supported internships or entry-level roles – need to be protected, and if necessary, evolve with technology, rather than be displaced by technology.
The Milburn Review offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to address the systematic factors that can either support or undermine a young person’s work readiness. A priority should be greater integration between education and work with baked-in incentives for employers to commit the necessary time, resource and innovation.
