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Nearly a million young Britons, aged 16 to 24, were neither in education, employment nor training at the end of 2025, according to the UK’s Office for National Statistics.
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Young people are struggling to find their first job, and that may be because they are simply not ready to enter the job market, having missed out on crucial social development during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Unemployment among Generation Z is on the rise as almost a million young Britons, aged 16 to 24, were NEET (not in education, employment or training) between July and September 2025, according to the UK. Office for National Statistics.
Identified as a crisis, the government launched an independent review into NEET in December, led by former Labor health secretary Alan Milburn.
Worryingly, the ONS report reveals that almost 600,000 of these unemployed young people are not actively looking for work either.
Young people face several challenges in the labor market, since artificial intelligence eliminates entry-level positions to increased competition for jobs. More than 1.2 million applications were submitted for just 17,000 graduate positions in the UK last year, according to the UK’s Institute for Student Employers.
During this time, the number of job offers have decreased almost 10% over the year, reaching 729,000 between September and November a year ago, the ONS noted. Between August and October, there were 2.5 unemployed people per vacancy, compared to 1.8 the previous year.
It’s not just about the economic climate, with employers and experts saying that Generation Z is not sufficiently prepared to join the job market.
Milburn said The Times in a recent interview that employers find that young people are “not work ready” when they enter full-time employment after school. “Young people do not necessarily have professional experience and what they learned at school is not necessarily relevant for the world of work.”
Generation lock
UK charity Shaw Trust helps people find jobs and works to end the NEET crisis. Julie Leonard, Chief Impact Officer, explained how virtual learning and being at home during the 2020 lockdown created a socialization gap within Gen Z, particularly between the ages of 20 and 24, in an interview with CNBC Make It.
“There are a lot of young people who missed out on years of in-person education, work experience, work preparation, soft skills, and now find themselves adults and in a very difficult job market, and also in a recruiting landscape that has completely changed over the years,” Leonard said.
Soft skills like learning to lead a team, collaborate and follow directions are “essential to being work-ready” and Gen Z is “missing something.”
Many young people have not been forced to step out of their comfort zone at home, which includes talking to strangers, arriving on time to school or work, she added.
MP Milburn explained that young people cannot be blamed for not being ready to work and said opportunities for young people are in “sharp decline”.
“There has long been a decline in the number of 16- and 17-year-olds getting jobs on Saturdays,” Milburn said, in comments reported by the Times. “Previous generations, including mine, were all raised in a place where most of us were doing this type of job or doing a newspaper run or something. Not only did it provide opportunities for young people to make money, but it also allowed teenagers to learn what it meant to be in a workplace.
Leonard says these part-time jobs, such as babysitting, gardening or working in print media, were “essential” in familiarizing young people with the discipline of work. “We’ve lost that kind of stepping stone approach that is so crucial,” she said.
In fact, Big Four employers like KPMG and PWC have identified that their younger recruits lack essential workplace etiquette skills, like communication and collaboration.
PWC began offering resilience training to toughen up its new graduate recruits in 2025 and blame the lack of “human skills” on the pandemic. In 2023, KPMG began offering soft skills sessions for young recruits, particularly on teamwork and how to make presentations.
Ask for jobs in person
Leonard recommends going back to old-school tactics for getting a job, rather than sitting behind a screen and sending out an endless number of resumes that will eventually be rejected by the AI.
Indeed, now that the job search has become essentially digital, many young people are sending CVs written by AI. “It’s become so depersonalized, and they send emails, they often get no response, which is extremely demotivating,” Leonard said.
Go to your local store and ask for a job, advises Julie Leonard, impact manager at Shaw Trust.
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“Basically what you do is write a CV, you go down to the high street, you have someone who comes with you and gives you that resilience and that confidence to go and say ‘I’d like a job’,” she advised, saying it’s an exercise Shaw Trust counselors often do with young people.
The type of store where this tactic could be most successful includes local small and medium-sized businesses, bars, cafes, or other small and medium-sized businesses.
“You go in there with your resume, you have a conversation with a manager, you start opening doors. That’s the kind of work we do. It’s about holding hands, being resilient, gaining the confidence to go out. It’s not about sitting behind a laptop and just sending out resumes,” Leonard added.
