Eleanor Baker Barnes, Commercial Director, Apprenticeship Central, explains why refusing to hire young people today hollows out the future of managers and specialists.
Most of the noise about youth unemployment focuses on the young people. Far less attention goes to what it does to employers. That is a mistake because Britain’s NEET crisis is not only a youth problem – it is quietly building a seniority cliff.
Every organisation runs on a pipeline. Today’s trainee becomes tomorrow’s productive. Today’s junior becomes tomorrow’s manager. Today’s apprentice becomes the specialist you cannot operate without. Yet across the economy, businesses are growing reluctant to hire inexperienced young people. The safer bet is always someone who already has the skills and the track record.
I understand the caution. The young person with potential but no experience loses out to the older worker who can hit the ground running. The decision is understandable. The consequences, however, are a time bomb…
By the time a business notices the gap in its management or technical expertise, the damage is already done.”
When thousands of employers make the same safe choice, the entry-level opportunities disappear – and so does the supply of experienced people five and ten years from now. You can buy in experience for a while but, eventually, every business has to grow its own.
This is where Milburn’s review and the AI conversation collide. If employers stop hiring juniors now because software can handle the routine entry-level work, they are not just creating a youth unemployment problem for today. They are hollowing out their own senior expertise for 2030 and beyond. The managers, technical specialists and team leaders every organisation will depend on in a decade are the very people we are declining to take a chance on now.
You cannot fast-forward judgement. It is built over years of solved problems, near-misses and hard-won experience. Close the door at the entry point and we do not just lose a generation of juniors – we lose the seniors they would have become.
This is not a distant worry. The decisions that create that gap are being made in recruitment rounds this year.
Nowhere is this sharper than in technical and skilled industries, where experienced staff are heading for retirement and there simply are not enough younger people coming through to replace them. By the time a business notices the gap in its management or technical expertise, the damage is already done. The conversation about skills shortages almost always starts too late.
At Apprenticeship Central we spend our days helping employers turn willingness into opportunity, and the hesitation we meet is almost never about enthusiasm. It is about risk. Employers genuinely want to help, then find ten reasons why this particular young person, this particular month, is not quite the right fit.
But the smartest act anyway. I have watched employers move their most experienced technicians onto part-time hours purely to keep them in the building – and bring apprentices in alongside them, deliberately, to capture that expertise before it walks out the door for good. That is what taking the cliff seriously looks like.
The organisations still investing in young talent are not being charitable. They are protecting their own future capability. The ones playing it safe are quietly mortgaging theirs.
So the question every employer should be asking is not whether they can afford to recruit and develop young people. It is whether they can afford not to.
