Gen Z just isn’t seen as ‘work-ready’ – here’s why a million young brits are unemployed

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Gen Z just isn’t seen as ‘work-ready’ – here’s why a million young brits are unemployed

Published Sat, Jan 10 2026

2:35 AM EST

thumbnailSawdah Bhaimiya

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Nearly a million young British people, between the ages of 16 and 24, were not in education, employment or training at the end of 2025, per the U.K. Office for National Statistics.

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Young people are struggling to score their first jobs, and it might be because they're just not ready to enter the workforce, after missing out on critical social development during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Joblessness in Generation Z is on the rise as nearly one million young British people, between the ages of 16 and 24, were NEETs (not in education, employment, or training), between July and September 2025, according to the U.K. Office for National Statistics.

Identified as a crisis, the government launched an independent review into NEETs in December, led by former Labour Health Secretary Alan Milburn.

Worryingly, the ONS report found that almost 600,000 of those young people who were unemployed were also not actively looking for a job.

Young people are facing several challenges in the job market, from artificial intelligence eliminating entry-level positions to increased competition for jobs. More than 1.2 million applications were submitted for just 17,000 graduate roles in the U.K. last year, per The U.K.'s Institute for Student Employers.

Meanwhile, the number of job openings have decreased nearly 10% on the year to 729,000 in the September to November period from a year ago, the ONS found. There were 2.5 unemployed people per vacancy between August and October, up from 1.8 the previous year.

It's not just the economic climate, with employers and experts saying that Gen Z are not adequately prepared to join the workforce.

Milburn told The Times in a recent interview that employers find that young people "aren't work ready" when they enter full-time jobs after school. "Young people don't necessarily have work experience, and what they have learnt at school isn't necessarily pertinent for the world of work."

Generation Lockdown

U.K.-based charity Shaw Trust helps people find employment and is working to end the NEETs crisis. Chief Impact Officer Julie Leonard broke down how virtual learning and being at home during the 2020 lockdown created a socialization gap in Gen Z, particularly between the ages of 20 and 24, in an interview with CNBC Make It.

"You've got a lot of young people who missed out on years of in person, education, work experience, work readiness, soft skills, and who now find themselves adults and in a very difficult job market, and also in a recruitment landscape that has completely changed over the years," Leonard said.

Soft skills like learning to lead a team, collaboration, following instructions are "so core to being work-ready," and Gen Z "missed out."

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Many young people weren't forced to get out of their comfort zone at home, which includes talking to strangers, showing up on time for school or work, she added.

MP Milburn explained that young people can't be blamed for not being ready to work and said opportunities for young people are in "sharp decline."

"There's been a longstanding decline in 16 and 17-year-olds getting Saturday jobs," Milburn said, in comments reported by The Times. "Previous generations, including mine, were all brought up where most of us had that type of job or had a paper round or whatever. That not only provided youngsters with the opportunity to earn but it also allowed teenagers to learn about what it meant to be in a workplace.

Leonard says these part time jobs such as babysitting, gardening, or being on the paper route were "critical" to getting young people familiar with the discipline of work. "We've lost that kind of stepping stone approach that is so critical," she said.

In fact, employers at Big Four firms like KPMG and PWC have identified that their youngest recruits are lacking essential work etiquette skills like communication and collaboration.

PWC started offering resilience training to toughen up its new graduate recruits in 2025 and pinned the lack of "human-skills" on the pandemic. In 2023, KPMG started offering soft skill sessions for young recruits including on teamwork and how to give presentations.

Ask for jobs in-person

Leonard recommends going back to old-school tactics to secure jobs, rather than sitting behind a screen and sending off an endless number of CVs that will eventually be rejected by AI.

Indeed, now that job hunting has become primarily digital, many young people are sending off CVs written by AI. "It's become so depersonalized, and they send off the email, they often get no response whatsoever, which is extremely demotivating," Leonard said.

Walk into your local shop and ask for a job, advises Julie Leonard, chief impact officer at Shaw Trust.

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"Actually, what you do is you make a CV, you go down the high street, you have somebody walk with you and give you that resilience and that confidence to go and say 'I would like a job,'" she advised saying that this is an exercize Shaw Trust advisors often carry out with young people.

The kind of shop where this tactic might be most successful includes local mom-and-pop busineses, bars, cafes, or other small and medium enterprizes.

"You go in there with your CV, you have a conversation with a manager, you start to open doors. That's the type of work that we do. It's the hand holding, the resilience, the confidence building to step out. It's not sitting behind a laptop and just sending CVs," Leonard added.

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