Trained, certified, and still NEET: Jasmine Piakan on the youth unemployment trap
“Learn to code.” “Get qualified.” “Do the training.” The message drilled into young people is that unemployment is a skills problem: fix the skills, fix the joblessness. But spend time inside a Jobcentre, a training scheme, or the endless scroll of job listings, and a different picture emerges: young people collecting qualifications while stable opportunities remain just out of reach.
The scale of the issue is stark. As of late 2025, nearly one million young people aged 16-24 were NEET. Over the past decade, billions have been funnelled into traineeships, Kickstart placements, and sector-based work academies. At its best, training can be transformative. Good apprenticeships with proper funding, mentorship, and a clear route into a role still offer one of the most reliable pathways into work. Some sector-based programmes do, in fact, lead directly to jobs when tied to real demand.
But those examples aren’t the whole story. Too often, training feels like movement without direction: a cycle of short placements, polite endings, and the subtle suggestion to try again elsewhere. Employers may get a year of subsidised help, and the youth get experience, but not always a foothold.
This is the reality facing many 16–30-year-olds, a generation shaped by the aftershocks of the financial crisis, Brexit, and the pandemic.
Pre-pandemic, youth unemployment and NEET rates were already stubborn. Post-pandemic, the picture has become more uneven. For many young people, the recovery feels partial and fragile. NEET — Behind the acronym are young people refreshing inboxes, checking job apps between errands, waiting for something to land.
Online, the narrative seems harsher. LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok are filled with influencers preaching career self-optimisation: build a personal brand, monetise your skills, message relentlessly. It sounds empowering, but it can land differently for those already struggling, especially for more vulnerable groups who statistically face higher barriers to employment. The message becomes internalised: if nothing’s working, you must not be doing enough. A structural issue becomes a personal failing.
Then there’s technology. A lot of job applications never reach human eyes: algorithms scan CVs, and Applicant Tracking Systems filter out submissions before a recruiter reads them. Young people spend hours tailoring applications, only to receive an automated rejection sometimes hours later. Over time, that takes a toll. It’s not just professional rejection; it’s digital rejection, arriving in the same spaces where you talk to friends and watch others announce new jobs and life milestones; so the line between your working life and your personal life blurs.
Part of the shift is in the nature of work itself. Where there were once clearer ladders, there are now fragmented steps: temporary contracts, variable hours, platform-based work. It’s harder to build anything stable on top of something that keeps resetting. And stability is the keyword. Young people aren’t only looking for security; they’re looking for predictability, direction, the ability to plan a life.
Despite the government’s talks of opportunity and growth, a wide gap persists between rhetoric and reality. If Labour is serious about ending the NEET crisis, it needs to move beyond recycled training schemes to tackle the structural mismatch between effort and outcome — through measures like a genuine Youth Guarantee offering every young person a statutory right to a decent job, apprenticeship, or training within months of becoming unemployed, or by banning exploitative zero-hour contracts for under-25s to provide the stability needed to build secure futures free from weekly rota uncertainty.
From where I’m standing, this challenge is compounded by an increasingly addictive algorithmic culture driven by major tech companies. A firmer government crackdown, similar to measures in other countries, could better safeguard not just child but youth development too.
Trade unions like the TUC have long argued that youth unemployment demands structural solutions through ambitious plans like expanded unionised apprenticeships, better pay progression and reforms to curb exploitative unpaid internships that disadvantage those without adequate financial backing. Unions such as Unite have pushed similar ideas, linking climate investment to secure green jobs for the next generation.
Over the years, I’ve seen it play out too many times: capable, motivated young people who’ve done everything asked of them and are still waiting for something to stick. Not because they’ve failed, but because the system keeps offering motion instead of momentum.
You can’t train your way out of a shortage of secure jobs, or solve precarity with more preparation alone. What’s needed isn’t just more programmes, but much clearer pathways and systems that connect effort to opportunity in a meaningful way.
Young people don’t need endless cycles of readiness. They need a genuine chance — something solid to build on. Stability, direction, and a future that feels possible.