David Edwards, author of Strategic Workforce Planning Handbook and former Head of Workforce Planning at Ericsson calls on organisations to manage the NEET challenge.
The UK statistics for young NEETs get quoted often enough that most HR leaders can recite them without needing a source. Young people not in education, employment or training are a growing share of a generation, a share seemingly lost to any kind of rewarding future. That is not the point I want to make here.
This is not a social policy story HR gets to watch from the sidelines. It is a workforce planning problem, and most organisations are not treating it as one. Worse, in a lot of cases organisations are actively making it worse through decisions that have nothing to do with youth unemployment policy and everything to do with how they think about entry-level hiring.
Capability sits beneath strategy, not beside it
I keep coming back to Kodak and Blockbuster when I talk about this, not just because I am of an era where those are names that really mean something to me – when I was young, I assumed that all cameras and film were made by Kodak – but because the lesson generalises further than most people want it to. Neither company failed because it lacked a strategy. Both failed because the workforce capability underneath the strategy was not there when it mattered, and nobody had been tracking that gap early enough to close it.
A growing NEET population is a leading indicator of exactly that kind of gap. It shows up years before it becomes a hiring problem, and by the time it becomes a hiring problem it is too late to do much about it through recruitment alone. Workforce planning is supposed to be the discipline that catches this sort of thing early. Mostly, it doesn’t, because people aren’t actually looking terribly far ahead.
Forecasting is the wrong tool here
Most of what gets written on this subject treats it as a forecasting exercise. Bigger number this year than last year, projected to keep growing, here is what that means for GDP or benefits spending in a decade. That framing is fine for economists. It is not much use to a workforce planning function that needs to decide what to do next.
“Stop treating this as a corporate social responsibility topic that sits next to workforce planning rather than inside it. This is talent supply chain risk.”
The job here is judgement under uncertainty, not prediction. Nobody can forecast precisely how many entry-level roles a business will need in five years, or exactly which skills will matter by then. What can be decided now, with the information available, is whether an organisation is building any pipeline of its own or simply assuming the external market will keep supplying what it needs. Those are two different postures, and only one of them is a plan.
None of this happens through a single lens. It sits alongside apprenticeships, graduate schemes, entry-level headcount, an ageing senior workforce, and the way AI is reshaping what work looks like at every level. Pulling those threads together into a single coherent view of where the risk actually sits is synthesis, and synthesis is the fundamental art of workforce planning. Not forecasting, not modelling, but synthesis. Treat any one of these threads in isolation and it will always be somebody else’s problem. Bring them together and it becomes something a planning function can can interpret for an organisation to actually act on.
The changing shape of the organisation
The traditional workforce shape is a pyramid: wide at the entry level, narrowing as it rises to the lofty peak of seniority. Now picture what happens when organisations keep cutting the base while leaving the middle and top largely intact. The pyramid stops being a pyramid. It turns into a diamond, and eventually a diamond standing on its edge. That is what is happening. The lower reaches of the pyramid are presumed to be fair game for AI and automation in general to step in and replace what used to be entry level workers.
But a diamond balanced on its point is not a stable shape. It is a succession faux pas waiting to happen. There is no broad base feeding people up through the organisation, no volume of early career talent to select from and develop, and no depth to fall back on when senior people leave. Organisations that keep hollowing out the entry level are quietly reshaping themselves into something that is likely to fall over, and most of them have not noticed the shape they are becoming; or, which is worse, they’re doing so consciously without having considered the longer-term consequences.
Have we got this wrong?
I think the continued move against early career hiring, the steady reduction in entry-level roles that so many organisations have been quietly making, is a mistake. Not a minor one either.
Some of this is being driven by AI, as I have said. Entry-level roles are disproportionately exposed to that change, because a lot of what used to sit at the bottom of the ladder was exactly the kind of structured, repeatable work that automation handles well. So organisations cut there first, because it is the easiest place to cut and the impact is least visible in the short term. That fits the prevailing narrative that AI must reduce costs and investors are expecting instant results.
There is a sharper irony sitting underneath this. The young people being kept out of the market are, in most cases, going to be better at working with these technologies than the experienced staff currently being retained and having their own work augmented by AI. I say this as someone well into their seventh decade who prides themselves on remaining broadly current with technological development but only fractionally competent compared to their own grandchild. So organisations are choosing to keep the cohort less fluent in new tools and locking out the cohort that would be inherently more fluent in them. That trade only looks sensible in the short term, because the experienced staff being retained will not be there forever. One day they walk out the door, or they get carried out. Either way, the organisation loses the capability it chose to keep and for which it never built a replacement.
The problem is that entry-level roles are also where new capability used to come from more generally. Organisations are removing the first rung of the ladder without asking what replaces it, and in a lot of cases the honest answer is nothing does. That is not a hypothetical risk sitting somewhere in the future. It is a decision being made right now, in budget conversations that have nothing to do with workforce strategy on paper, and everything to do with it in practice.
In any case, we’re now seeing two very clear developments that don’t fit the prevailing narrative about an AI-driven jobs catastrophe: AI changes the composition of remaining work rather than simply cutting headcount; and it’s not exactly creating the tsunami of job losses everyone expected.
What to actually do before the year ends
If you’re thinking about next year’s plan rather than next decade’s economy, then consider this:
- Put early career capability into workforce risk as a named line item, not an assumption buried under “external hiring will cover it.” If it is not written down as a risk, it won’t be managed as one.
- Make the build versus buy decision on purpose. Structured entry programmes and apprenticeships are a deliberate choice to build capability internally. Continuing to assume the external market will supply what is needed is also a choice, it just rarely gets made consciously.
- Look honestly at where AI is removing entry-level roles inside your own organisation and ask whether that was an intentional decision or something that happened by default because it was the easiest place to find savings
Finally, stop treating this as a corporate social responsibility topic that sits next to workforce planning rather than inside it. This is talent supply chain risk. It deserves the same seriousness as any other supply chain the business depends on.
None of this requires a grand strategic reset. It requires organisations to notice that they are already making a choice about early career talent, whether they mean to or not, and that the next few months of planning is where their course either gets corrected or locked in for another year. The trend is one visible symptom of a much larger decision most organisations have not consciously made, and nothing I’ve seen about current hiring practice suggests it is about to reverse on its own.
